Julie Roberts at Sean Kelly

"Heroes and Villains," Julie Roberts's next to the first solo painting exhibition at Sean Kelly and a continuation of her ongoing critique of institutionalized male dominance, center upon royal and political themes from European art history. The paintings rarely include figures (a noteworthy exception being her version of David's Death of Marat), allowing a human presence is many times conjured in tableaux that exhibit evidence of recent habitation or percepts evocative of the body.

This exhibition began with Boudoir (1999) which depicts a circular space with high windows draped in powder-blue silk curtains and a scattering of matching upholster chairs. The Baroque boudoir was the completed prelude to the exhibition's primary work, a 1997 installation titled expanse of the Parrots. An enclosing formed of three walls painted with a faint pattern of flowers and exotic birds, the work incorporates sum of two units canvases (also 1997) hung upon adjacent walls, The King's chair of state and Siege d'Amour (King Edward VII's be fond of Chair). The first, based upon the throne of the Medici-Lorraine-Savoy court, is faithfully returned in the stately golds, red and sapphirines favored during the Renaissance. The latter depicts its strange object--a clinical-looking chair designed for the English monarch in the late 19th hundred to facilitate intercourse--in a light palette of whitewashed forest-land and mint green fabric. The juxtaposition of formal court furniture with an idiosyncratic erotic apparatus points to a connection between public power and private pleasure, between dynastic authority and sexual conquest

Roberts's dispassionate approach to her make submissives contrasts with the lush painting diction with which she portrays them. She floats the images upon flat or softly patterned monochromatic loams whose wet, glossy appearance (as if brushed or delicately knifed solitary moments ago) and creamy palette indicate icing on a cake. These surfaces can be seductively moderately beautiful and they have been criticized accordingly. notwithstanding it is not so a great deal of this sheer loveliness that threatens to compromise the work's critical intent as its programmatic appearance: the paintings have of the like kind a consistently stylized look, individual can miss the nuances of their individual meanings.

In the extremity the most provocative aspect of "Heroes and Villains" was the implication of collusion between monarchical power and the official custodians of art history. The domestic interiors in which Roberts dramatizes this collusion reveal ends for women in an intriguing, if sometimes vague, way. individual hopes Roberts pursues the theme in subsequent time works.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group