Past Exhibition
Paintings
Lucy Hogg
November 2000
Between November 29, 2000 and January 7, 2001, the Durham Art Gallery will feature two bodies of work by Vancouver-based artist Lucy Hogg: recent figurative and abstract paintings.
Lucy Hogg's large-scale figurative paintings explore issues of authenticity, authorship and intertextuality. She interprets historical paintings by imposing contemporary perspectives upon work which has occupied a specific historical context. Her current series of strongly coloured paintings carries on the analysis of the image of the artist in historical painting.
"I chose representations for their embodiment of certain stereotypes: the angry, serious, bitter, modest, juvenile, etc." says the artist. "Using colour to bring out their particular flavour, I want to gently mock the figures' dandified seriousness."
"The absence of the woman artist is apparent, paralleling the experience of your average trip to a museum. The female subject is displaced, buried in the foliage, imbedded in the contours of a suit jacket, masquerading in an eccentric headdress. As a kind of counterpoint, the male subjects are given a fetishized treatment, the brushstroke glancing off their forms, rendering them transparent, ephemeral, and maybe erotic. There is a component of desire inherent in my will to identify with these figures. To have or to be, I can't make up my mind."
Artist's statement
Lucy Hogg teaches at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. Her work was featured in national and international exhibitions and is in the collection of the Art Bank, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and the University of Toronto.
Curator - Tony Massett