4 chazen museum of art exhibitions
Daumier Lithographs:
Characters and Caricatures
December 23, 2016 – February 19, 2017
Leslie and Johanna Garfield Galleries
Martha Glowacki’ s Natural History, Observations and Reflections
March 3 – May 14, 2017
Leslie and Johanna Garfield Galleries
Drawn from the Chazen’ s collection of nearly nine hundred prints by the great French caricaturist Honoré Daumier, this exhibition follows the artist’ s development as the foremost satirist of his day. Daumier began his career during a short period of relaxed censorship in France and took advantage of the opportunity to directly caricature King Louis Philippe I. Daumier’ s gleeful prints frequently portrayed the king as a pear, and often as corrupt. By 1835, the king had reinstituted censorship of images and Daumier turned his attention to his fellow Parisians: fads of the bourgeoisie, lawyers, and feminists were all regular targets.
Martha Glowacki’ s installations concern human observation and description of the natural world. In this exhibition, she is particularly interested in developing themes and images from the history of science and scientific illustration.
Glowacki incorporates scientific illustration and writing in several ways, ranging from direct appropriation of images into artworks to using images and ideas from the history of science as a bridge to developing visual metaphors. On one hand, she is drawn to the visual richness of many scientific illustrations and to the qualities of the paper and print techniques used to make them. She is also fascinated by the unexpected ways that many of these illustrations combine beauty with morbidity, or by their odd juxtapositions of text with inscrutable processes.
Martha Glowacki( American, b. 1950), Lacuna( mirror box illusion), 2016, cast iron, bronze, wood, mirrors, marbleized paper, animal bones, pigments, 42 x 24 x 24 in., courtesy of the artist