BMA Presents Powerful Photographs Reinterpreting Masterworks of Painting

BALTIMORE, MD (February 26, 2016)—The Baltimore Museum of Art presents four large-scale, dramatic color photographs that bring new meaning to masterworks of painting in On Paper: Picturing Painting, on view March 30—October 23, 2016. The featured works combine elements of historical paintings with traits particular to photography to create images with a unique and powerful presence.

At the end of the 20th century, a number of artists created photographs that seemed to share more attributes with painting than with photography’s conventional roles within the fields of journalism and advertising. “The images in this exhibition take this comparison a step further by reinterpreting masterworks of painting as photographs,” said Kristen Hileman, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art. “In some case fashioned as an homage, in others a critique.”

Examples include Rineke Dijkstra’s Hel. Poland, August 12, 1998 (1998), Andres Serrano’s Black Supper (1990, printed 1992), Starn Twins’ Large Blue Film Picasso (1988–89), and Mickalene Thomas’ Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Le Trois Femmes Noires (2010). These works were influenced respectively by Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1486), Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1494–99), Pablo Picasso’s Deux femmes nues assises (1921), and Édouard Manet’s Le dejeuner sur l’herbe (1863).

The exhibition is curated by Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman.