Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

All

11 / 15

Previous Next

Making Faces

11

During the late 1960s, many artists began to use the body—frequently their own—as an expressive medium. They refused conventional forms of painting and sculpture, instead turning themselves into their raw materials through comic play and madcap self-portraiture. Bruce Nauman’s mock-serious efforts to mold his own body and Scott Grieger’s impersonations of sculptures by well-known contemporaries, for example, spoof the role of the artist. Works by Cynthia Maughan and Hannah Wilke, meanwhile, offer feminist parodies of popular representations of women.

Using photography, film, and video in nontraditional ways, the artists whose work is included in this section borrowed the casual immediacy of snapshots, photo booths, and home movies. Art is no longer a realm of lofty values, but rather a forum for spontaneity and improvisation. At the same time, portraiture ceases to be a solemn introspective exercise, becoming instead a springboard for subversive and often humorous creative experiments.

Below is a selection of works from Making Faces.

Back

1 / 7

Previous Next

ROBERT GROSVENOR, 1970

Scott Grieger (b. 1946), Robert Grosvenor, 1970, from the portfolio Impersonations. Offset lithograph, sheet: 10 1/4 × 7 3/8 in. (26 × 18.7 cm); image: 8 3/16 × 5 3/8 in. (20.8 × 13.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Marcia Tucker 71.203.3

Scott Grieger’s Impersonations are self-portraits that playfully reference acclaimed artists by mimicking their iconic works or signature formats. Grieger uses his own body to suggest the illuminated disc of a Robert Irwin painting, a protruding geometric sculpture by Robert Grosvenor, and the size contrast between the viewer and a colossal Claes Oldenburg sculpture of an everyday object. With this portfolio, Grieger demonstrates that even the most abstract artworks can be related to the human form.

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 383 works

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.