Clio Newton: Venus

CLIO NEWTON VENUS

CLIO NEWTON VENUS September 26 – November 9, 2019

FORUM GALLERY

IN PRAISE OF THE PLAUSIBLY IMPOSSIBLE by eleanor heartney Clio Newton’s Michel is a monumental drawing that, at first glance, presents the kind of pensive young woman familiar from art of the Romantic era. There is a touch of the ethereal beauty of the Pre-Raphaelite goddesses in her sidelong gaze, and perhaps the wildness of Delacroix in her loose hair. She sits with her body torqued before a bucolic wooded landscape that speaks of her connection to nature, fertility and essential femininity. But immediately one senses that something is awry. She wraps her body with her powerful arms, clutching herself with hands that bring to mind the taut sinews of a Michelangelo sculpture. Though her face is unmistakably female, her body is obviously male.

This work, like all the others in this series, is an exquisitely rendered portrait of a hybrid figure. Female heads merge seamlessly into male bodies. The moment of transition is imperceptible—in some works it appears to happen around the shoulders or neck, in others we only become aware of the shift in genders in the arms and legs. Sometimes it is masked by masses of falling hair. Or it only becomes evident in the thickening of shoulders or the unexpected hairiness of chest or legs. Yet, though they contain markers of both genders, these figures are in no way androgynous. Their simultaneous maleness and femaleness are unmistakable. In an era of gender fluidity these beautiful young people remain unaccountably disconcerting.

Why should this melding of genders be so unsettling? In part, the answer may lie in history, in the fraught status of the nude in art. The Western figurative tradition is deeply enmeshed in shifting conventions of beauty, eroticism and gender relations. Classical Greek artists celebrated the glory of the male body. Female nudes were few and far between, reflecting the secondary status of women, not only as second-class citizens but also as objects of desire. When the Renaissance rediscovered the nude, the Greek model initially held sway, reinforced by the greater availability of male models and by Church teachings about the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib. The male body was the ideal one, the female its pale reflection.

This led to the phenomenon of female nudes that have been characterized as “men with breasts.”

Soon, however, the female nude came into its own and for over four centuries, the female body became the eroticized and fetishized object of the male gaze. Again reflecting the power hierarchy of the larger society, women were presented as objects to be possessed. And the female nude could serve as a subterfuge. At the height of Victorian prudery when propriety demanded that even table legs be clothed, artists could get away with sexualized female nudes by o≠ering them up as allegories of justice and freedom or such arcane subjects as electricity and commerce.

Newton’s work at once embraces and confuses this history. Her drawings are rife with specific and generalized art historical references.

Among the works that kicked o≠ this series is Eden. Inspired by Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, it gives us a classically beautiful female head whose muscular and hirsute body assumes the languid pose of Botticelli’s graceful goddess.

The dissonance between body and head is accentuated by our memories of the Renaissance artist’s evocation of fragile femininity. Other works o≠er glimpses of a range of Old Masters who focused on the figure, as well as several more recent artists. Harper’s hand curls up beneath the clavicle, clenched in the way that Michelangelo’s David grasps his sling. The figure’s face, meanwhile, half turns away from us with an expression of tense alertness that recalls the Delphic Sibyl of the Sistine Chapel. The drawing’s background o≠ers a pastoral landscape that evokes the quietly rolling hills in the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. Jules presents the magnificent profile of a beautiful black woman. Her head is attached to a long arched neck that conjures the famous sculpture of Nefertiti from the 14th century BC. But instead of the ancient Queen’s gentle shoulders, Jules’ head is supported by a powerful masculine chest. Remi Gazing depicts a full body figure. Here the deep shadows and dramatic twist of the beautiful female head carry an echo of Caravaggio’s famous chiaroscuro while the muscular arms and legs seem to push out toward our space in a manner that recalls that master’s e≠orts to break out of the picture plane. Sometimes borrowings are explicit, as in Eden, where the pose comes from Botticelli and the backdrop is a beach scene taken from the photographs of Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra. Like Newton, Dijkstra presents images of adolescence and young adulthood. For both artists, the beach setting suggests the fluid and unformed nature of youthful identity.

But if these drawings echo the long tradition of the nude in art history, they also undercut it. The power of these hybrid bodies is at odds with the

soft pliability of the female flesh depicted by artists like Rubens, Titian and Rembrandt. The faces are too specific and the expressions too selfaware to conform to the vacant availability that has so often fueled the fantasies of male painters of the female nude. The scale also alters the dynamic between viewer and subject. These drawings are huge—they tower over the viewer and deny the implied possibility of possession that so often accompanied erotic paintings of women from the Renaissance on.

One must step back to take them in full. Up close, where the invitation to engage might be expected to take place, one is instead caught up in the almost abstract nature of the charcoal markings that comprise these images. The surface takes over and the figures start to disappear.

The unease generated by these works has another source as well. The drawings inevitably point to the fraught nature of gender distinctions today. Issues of gender fluidity, gender dysphoria and trans-identity are chipping away at the binary model that has so long ruled Western culture. The growing visibility of gender variance threatens to undermine the hierarchies that determine behavior, social power structures, cultural boundaries and standards of beauty. Acceptance of transgender individuals in fields like the military, education and the arts shifts with the political winds. Feminists wonder what becomes of their battle against patriarchy when distinctions between men and women blur. Sports records have been thrown into disarray by athletes who fail to register a clear gender identity. Even corporate America is recognizing this change as it explores the use of transgender models as a marketing strategy. In the midst of all this, Newton’s hybrid figures present no polemic. They do not ask for our acceptance or understanding. In today’s climate, their willingness to simply be themselves o≠ers a bracing tonic.

Newton has noted that one inspiration for this work is a provocative essay by artist Mike Kelley titled “Playing with Dead Things.” In this long text, Kelley searches for ways to understand “the uncanny.” This is a term originally introduced by Freud to describe the unsettling feeling when something familiar is experienced as unsettling, eerie, or taboo. Kelley describes the uncanny as “a somewhat muted sense of horror: horror mixed with confusion” and as “fear caused by intellectual uncertainty.”

He locates it in such apparently animate three-dimensional objects as dolls, mannequins, waxworks, animatronic robots and the like. Similarly, Newton’s hybrid figures seem endowed with life, even as we are forced to

acknowledge that they are physically “impossible.” Kelley describes the way that certain artists present the body as a kind of anagram that can be rescrambled to create new meanings. That seems an apt description of the e≠ect of Newton’s uncanny creations.

These drawings short-circuit our normal ways of seeing. Newton renders her figures with a delicate precision that conjures such oftdenigrated styles as academic drawing, illustration or photorealism. In doing so she draws on modes of representation that blur the boundaries between the ideal and the real. She bases these figures on real people, using friends and relatives as models for both the faces and the bodies.

Their specificity is such that we would surely recognize the originals if we were to encounter them in real life. And yet, by presenting her figures in classical poses and placing them either against flat white grounds or invented landscape settings, Newton detaches them from the world as we know it. The series title, Venus, underscores these characters’ attachment to the realm of myth, fantasy and archetype.

The drawings in this series readily acknowledge their own artifice while seducing us into a willing suspension of disbelief. The figures they present are at once real and not real, idealized and particular, plausible and impossible. They draw us in while they hold us back from a world we can never enter. They remind us that art is the realm of the imagination, never more so than when it serves up a convincing illusion of reality.

Eleanor Heartney is a contributing editor to Art in America and Artpress and author of numer­ous books and articles on contemporary art including Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads (1997), Postmodernism (2001), Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (2004), Art and Today (2008), and Doomsday Dreams: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art (2019). She is co-author of After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art (2007), and The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium (2013). She received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism in 1992, and was honored by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2008. Heartney is a past President of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association.

Hayden, 2019 compressed charcoal on paper 91 x 58 inches framed: 94 1/2 x 61 1/2 inches Collection of Colin and Rosemary Bodell

Sasha, 2018 compressed charcoal on paper 92 3/ 8 x 58 inches framed: 96 x 62 inches The Baltimore Museum of Art: Purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Remi Gazing, 2019 compressed charcoal on paper 88 1/2 x 58 inches framed: 92 x 61 1/2 inches

Eden, 2019 compressed charcoal on paper 91 x 58 inches framed: 94 1/2 x 61 1/2 inches

Michel, 2019 compressed charcoal on paper 88 1/2 x 58 inches framed: 91 x 61 1/2 inches

RenĂŠ, 2019 compressed charcoal on paper 91 x 58 inches framed: 94 1/2 x 61 1/2 inches

Taylor, 2019 compressed charcoal on paper 92 3/ 8 x 58 inches framed: 96 x 62 inches Collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, 21c Museum Hotels

Jules, 2019 compressed charcoal on paper 66 1/2 x 53 1/2 inches framed: 70 1/2 x 57 inches

Clio Newton in her studio. Pictured left to right: Sasha, 2018; Taylor, 2019.

CLIO NEWTON born:

1989

education:

2016–2019 MFA, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zürich, Switzerland 2011–2013 Florence Academy of Fine Arts, Florence, Italy 2007–2011 BFA, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY

one person exhibitions: 2019 2017 2016

Clio Newton: Venus, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Clio Newton: Go From Home, Tart Gallery, Zürich, Switzerland Clio Newton: New Works, Greene Gallery, Guilford, CT

selected group exhibitions: 2019

Diplomaustellung, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zürich, Switzerland

Person to Person, Forum Gallery, New York, NY

2018

The Future is Female, 21C Museum, Bentonville, AR

2017

Jungkunst: Selected Group Exhibition, Halle 53, Winterthur Realism, Benjamin Eck Galerie, Munich Selected Group Exhibition, Artagon, Paris, France American Realism, Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, NY

2016

Masters of American Realism, Sag Harbor Museum, Sag Harbor, NY

2015

Bathers of Uster, Zellweger Park, Zürich, Switzerland Face Figure Form, Greene Gallery, Guilford, CT

2014

Hadlyme Exhibits, Featured Artist, Hadlyme, CT

SONOart Collective, Creative Spaces Gallery, South Norwalk, CT

2012

Student Alumni Exhibition, Florence Academy, Florence, Italy

2011

Chris and Clio, Cooper Gallery, New York, NY

awards and grants: 2019

Migros Herden Atelier Stipendium, Zürich, Switzerland

2018

Guest Lecturer, Zürcher Hochschule der Kunste, Zürich, Switzerland Guest Lecturer, La Galeria Roja, Seville, Spain

2017

Artagon, Young Artists of Europe, Paris, France Buzzfeed: 100 most influential contemporary figurative artists

2016

Elizabeth Greenshields’ Grant Award

2015

AKKU Künstler Atelier Residency Award, Uster, Zürich, Switzerland

2013

Merit Scholarship, Florence Academy of Fine Arts, Florence, Italy

2012

Elizabeth Greenshields’ Grant Award Yale University commission: oil portrait of St. Anthony Hall presidents, New Haven, CT

2011

Cooper Union commission: twelve drawings of the institution’s past presidents, permanently installed in the New Academic Building, New York, NY

Pietro and Alfrieda Montana Drawing Prize

public collections:

21C Museum, Louisville, KY Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD Flint Institute of Art, Flint, MI Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM

Clio Newton in her studio. Pictured (in progress) from left to right: Jules, Michel, and Harper.

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