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Email PageKaren Finley 2006
February 10, 2006- March 18, 2006
Karen Finley
Venetia Kapernekas Gallery
526 W 26th StGray Kapernekas Gallery is pleased to present new works by Karen Finley. Known primarily for her performance art and writing, Finley will exhibit a large group of over 200 drawings based on her performance and forthcoming book, George and Martha, a satirical portrait of Martha Stewart and George Bush and their all-consuming love affair, extending her interest in narrative form and gender archetypes.
Over 200 drawings from George and Martha (Verso Books, 2006) will cover the gallery’s walls, salon style. In Finley’s signature style, the pen and ink drawings combine text and illustration, in small vignettes, recalling Andy Warhol’s early commercial drawings. Some of the images are fragments—an iron, a cowboy boot, a bouquet garni of herbs, a bag of cocaine, an apple pie, an American eagle. Other images are more explicit— an image of the President wearing cowboy boots while enjoying fellatio; a reclining nude Martha Stewart, with the text, “Mr. President, I am ready to be invaded and hand over the oil.” The drawings, roughly organized by chapters from the book, unfold with humor, politics, and offer a fin-de-siècle view of the ultimate convergence of popular culture, media, power, and capitalism.
Karen Finley is best known for her riveting and visceral solo performance work, which were at the center of the Culture Wars of the late 1980s. She has performed at hundreds of venues, notably Lincoln Center, The Public Theatre, The Kitchen, PS 122 in New York; Yale Repertory Theater, New Haven, CT; Carpenter Art Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; The Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, MN; Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago; the Wadsworth Auditorium at UCLA, Los Angeles; The Institute of Contemporary Art, London; and The National Theatre, Melbourne, Australia; The National Theatre of Portugal, Porto. Her visual art and installations have been exhibited internationally, at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Aldrich Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, OH; Center for Contemporary Art, New Orleans, LA; The Ballroom, Marfa, TX; and the Baltic Art Centre, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England; as well as multiple public projects with Creative Time, New York. She has published numerous books, including Shock Treatment, Enough is Enough, Pooh Unplugged and A Different Kind of Intimacy, and is the editor of Aroused: A Collection of Erotic Writings. Karen Finley is the recipient of numerous prestigious grants, including multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Art Matters, the Jerome Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has been recognized with an honorary Doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute, two Bessie Awards, an Obie Award, and in 1998 was named Ms. Foundation’s Woman of the Year. A frequent commentator, she has appeared on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and Charlie Rose, and contributes to the popular web blog, the Huffington Post. Finley has lectured extensively, and is currently an arts professor in Art and Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Art Reviews of Karen Finley 2006
| Financial Times February 11, 2006 | Anthony Haden-Guest | "Karen Finley is one of the most famous artists in the US. But hers is a bittersweet sort of fame. She became well-known as a performance artist......" |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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