Douglas Blau- at the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania
Suzannah Gerber
In the front gallery of the ICA is a collection of images:
photocopies, collages, and commercial postcards assembled in a hodgepodge, like an under-decorated scrapbook. The gallery walls here are more reminiscent of the walls of an artist’s studio and operate more like an archive of images that relate to the mind of one person rather than an exhibition of resolved works of art. A clear aesthetic sensibility emerges,
as we ca
n see what the artist self-selects, and what parts he chooses to magnify, repeat or collage. Images from the Italian Renaissance such as the College of Athens by Leonardo Da Vinci begin in color, as with a small postcard reproduction, and then shift to black and white in a photocopy that is blown up in scale, and in turn juxtaposed with a smiling Indian girl in native dress. The overall presentation is of a cabinet of wonders, a “my life in pictures”, and serves as a para-historical autobiographical survey of art. The wall-text alludes to this by suggesting that the images are meant simply “to be enjoyable to look at”, while the curatorial handout states that the artist creates “an essential cast of characters and repertoire of plots, periods, styles, locations, and genres… the details and degrees of abstraction vary over time and through reproduction.”
