The Met
Breuer | UPPER EAST SIDE | NEW YORK | USA
MARCH 21,
2018-JULY 22, 2018
Seven
hundred years of sculptural practice—from 14th-century Europe to the global
present—will be examined anew in this groundbreaking exhibition. Like Life:
Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now) explores narratives of sculpture in
which artists have sought to replicate the literal, living presence of the
human body. On view exclusively at The Met Breuer, this major international
loan exhibition of about 120 works will draw on The Met's rich collections of
European sculpture and modern and contemporary art, while also featuring a
selection of important works from national and international museums and
private collections.
Just how
perfectly should figurative sculpture resemble the human body? Histories and
theories of Western sculpture have typically favored idealized representations,
as exemplified by the austere, white marble statuary of the classical
tradition. Such works create the fiction of bodies existing outside time,
space, and personal or cultural experience. Like Life, by contrast, will place key
sculptures from different eras in conversation with each other, in order to
examine the age-old problem of realism and the different strategies deployed by
artists to blur the distinctions between original and copy, and life and art.
Foremost among these is the application of color to imitate skin and flesh.
Other tactics include the use of casts taken from real bodies, dressing
sculpted figures in clothing, constructing moveable limbs and automated bodies,
even incorporating human blood, hair, teeth, and bones. Uncanny in their
approximation of life, such works have the potential to unsettle and disarm
observers, forcing us to consider how we see ourselves and others, and to think
deeply about our common humanity.
Juxtaposing
well-known masterpieces with surprising and little-seen works, the exhibition
brings together sculptures by artists from Donatello, El Greco, Anna Morandi
Manzolini, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Antonio Canova, Auguste Rodin, and Edgar Degas to
Louise Bourgeois, Meret Oppenheim, Isa Genzken, Charles Ray, Fred Wilson,
Robert Gober, Bharti Kher, Duane Hansen, Jeff Koons, and Yinka Shonibare MBE,
as well as wax effigies, reliquaries, mannequins, and anatomical models.
Together, these works will highlight the continuing anxieties and pleasures attendant
upon the three-dimensional simulation of the human body.
Contact
details
+1.212.731.1675
945 Madison
Avenue (at 75th Street) , Upper East Side - New York, NY, USA 10021
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