Gallery Wendi Norris presents a selection of monumental and singular works by three artists spanning three generations of Contemporary and Modern art. Unapologetically deploying sensuality and beauty, artists María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Ana Teresa Fernández, and Dorothea Tanning lure viewers into their visual worlds only to reveal their often dark, political or distinctly global points of view.
For EXPO Chicago 2018, Gallery Wendi Norris proposes a trinity of monumental and singular works from each of these interdisciplinary artist’s oeuvres, spanning across distinct media. María Magdalena Campos-Pons will present, El Mensajero, a twelve part composition of rare large-scale Polaroids, altogether measuring roughly eight square feet. She speaks to the diasporic nature of her Afro-cuban heritage and Chinese ancestry by evoking strong mythological imagery of cranes, endemic to Cuba and inspired by the Japanese legend, Thousand Origami Cranes. Deploying a self-coined “baroque-minimalism” with ornate detail set in a rigorous structure, there underlies an investigation of the untold narrative of the slave trade’s effect on her ancestry. In this work, the artist combines equal parts performance, sculpture, classical painting, and photography. Robed in a personally designed costume, she likewise stages these self-framing photographs.
Having exhibited in museums alongside Ana Mendieta, Ana Teresa Fernández similarly uses her body, performance, and the land to address issues of feminism, social justice, and migration. Fernández will include a large scale, black oil painting from her Erasure series. Meticulously painted to document her performance where she erases her body with black paint in remembrance of the 43 missing students that the Mexican government has not yet acknowledged. Following on the heels of her 2017-2018 Denver Art Museum Installation,The Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA at the Getty, and museum exhibitions curated by Ed Ruscha, this marks the artist’s Chicago debut.
Dorothea Tanning will present two seminal paintings from the 1960s. This period marks her maturation of style; emblematic of her "prismatic" or "kaleidoscopic" lens, blurring familiar forms into swirling abstractions of color and light. “Elles se detachent, Majesteuses (Majestically),” 1965, reveals a seductive disintegration of forms in one of her largest works to come to market in years. Harnessing this whimsical visual play, Tanning invites the viewer to leave mundane constructs for a lyrical alternative. Tanning’s highly anticipated retrospective will open this fall at the Reina Sofia, and travel to the Tate Modern, focusing heavily on these later bodies of work.
