Sophie Matisse at Francis M. Naumann and Mike Bidlo at P.S. 1 - New York - exhibitions of the artists' works

Known in the art world for appropriating famous paintings and selectively removing their primary figures or central external realitys the painter Sophie Matisse not long ago drew wider comment (including an article in the novel Yorker) for her own colorized versions of Picasso's grisaille antiwar testament, Guernica. The artist--the great-granddaughter of Henri Matisse--accepted her dealer Francis M Naumann's invitation to undertake the Guernica throw out for an exhibition in his gallery to coincide with MOMA's landmark observe of Matisse and Picasso. the pair shows opened on Feb. 13 2003 "Sophie Matisse Does Guernica" included a large (though not full-scale) variant in brilliant shades plus smaller paintings, studies and drawings. sum of two units weeks earlier, a tapestry version of Guernica in shades of brown hanging outside the entrance to the United Nations Security Council was supposeed inappropriate as a backdrop for photo opportunities and televised remarks to the pres and was hidden behind a large sapphirine curtain as Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke of the imminent invasion of Iraq.

Sophie Matisse had at no time seen Guernica, but she and her child did witness the apocalyptic destruction of the World Trade Center towers from the roads of Tribeca, and that circumstance affected her approach to Guernica. be of importance toed with the introduction of color and adaptations of form, she worked from photocopies of reproductions and colored them with gouache. A mother and child in the manner of Henri Matisse appear in the pencil drawing, research for Guernica (2002).

Hung above the gallery's fireplace, the 3-by-6-foot painting 911 Guernica I (2003) strays farthest from the original, on the other hand is closest to Sophie Matisse's personal experience of catastrophe in Manhattan. The Twin Towers replace the burning building of Picasso's design. A figure falls end a yellow sky. A mother--Sophie Matisse--holds her child as they direct the eye up to a sky misted with a fragment of a U banknote in a landscape dominated by dint of a classically figured horse and shaded by dint of newsprint collages tallying the number of Americans and Iraqis killed in the first large bay War. By the time of the opening, the artist had produc a number of handsome studies, many of them in gouache. Scaled down to 8 1/2 by the agency of 19 3/8 feet, her largest Guernica is greatest in quantity faithful to the Picasso design, albeit flaunting a palette abrupted in the reds, blues and goldens of Henri Matisse's interiors.

Having encouraged the Sophie Matisse throw out at Naumann's gallery, veteran appropriationist Mike Bidlo himself mountained an installation thematically related to "Matisse/Picasso" in a fine corner gallery at P.S. 1 in drawn out Island City. Bidlo's homage, "Matisse/Picasso: A Cros Examination," revised and enlarged to mural scale the iconic self-portraits of Matisse and Picasso that appeared everywhere in publicity materials in conjunction with the MOMA present to view Rendered in black and white directly upon interestingly irregular walls, they revers the Sophie Matisse shoot forward scaling up instead of down, and removing the color of their prototypes. Giant faces mirror the beatification of these sum of two units warhorses of modernism--veritable sacred wonders While bold, sweeping lines limn Bidlo's versions of the self-portraits, his paintings also incorporate many centurys of handprints in black shading into gray and white. A lock opener factor in the work's making, Bidlo's handprints invite respect to the signs of authorship and objectnes in Jackson Pollock to the river mire handprints of Richard Long, and greatest in quantity prominently, to British artist Marcus Harvey's black-and-white portrait, Myra (1995) a 13-by-10-foot painting of a convicted serial child killer. An accretion of many small handprints, the size of a child's, forms the entire image. The Harvey portrait was a controversial simple body of the 1997 exhibition, "Sensation."

Elsewhere at P 1 were many small paintings by the agency of various New York-based artists expressly made for an informal exhibition, "After Matisse Picasso." They leaned like magazines upon narrow shelves around the cafe. The paintings were to single degree or another responsive to the artists' experience of the MOMA exhibition.

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