On Portraiture September 29, 2007

This discussion is moderated by co-curator Merrill Falkenberg, The Parrish Art Museum Robert Lehman Curator, with artists Karel Funk, Elizabeth King and Catherine Murphy. The panelists reflect three different approaches to portraiture. Karel Funk's microscopically detailed yet psychologically elusive paintings of partially hidden young men communicate ambivalence about the expressive capability of portraiture. Elizabeth King's amazingly lifelike sculptures bear an eerie resemblance to the artist and convey an almost extraterrestrial sense of wonder and awe. In Catherine Murphy's strikingly realistic paintings, one part of the body - a man's nipple, the back of a woman's head, lockets of hair in a sink - stands in mysterious relationship to the missing whole.