Oct 2nd through Nov 7th, 2010.
A trained attorney, Ellen Harvey’s career as an artist began to gather attention over a decade ago, when she took on the task of “tagging” known graffiti sites around the city of New York in what she titled The New York Beautification Project. Harvey painted forty oval vignettes in the Hudson River School style that illustrated serene landscapes, which intervened with the common graffiti artist’s studio – the street.
For the Bass Museum, Harvey has created an installation titled The Nudist Museum that uses the museum’s collection to reveal a wide variety of different historical paradigms of nudity. By copying every nude in the collection, she showcases nudes that represent purity, titillation, comedy, beauty, love and ugliness, as well as simple representations of the human body. The paintings are not exact copies. The nudes were copied from the museum’s documentation rather than from the originals, with the result that the level of detail in each painting strongly reflects the resolution of the source documentation. The project is a continuation of a recent series of exhibitions in which Harvey redefines different gallery and museum spaces at the same time that she challenges the audience’s perception and understanding of the artwork that occupy such spaces.
Ellen Harvey was born in the United Kingdom and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been the subject of several publications and periodicals. She has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and internationally and was featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Her most recent shows include The Room of Sublime Wallpaper at The APF Lab in New York and Beautiful Ruin at The Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland. She is represented by Stephan Stoyanov Gallery in New York.
Bass Museum of Art
2121 Park Avenue
Miami Beach, 33139
305 673 7530
www.bassmuseum.org
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