Gallery Studio Exhibition @ Brooklyn Museum

For the last two weeks I have been installing an exhibition of student work at the Brooklyn Museum (opens Saturday 14th January 2012). Participants from the museum’s Gallery Studio Program have spent the past ten weeks working with practicing artist. Taking inspiration from works in the collection, students experimented with process, material and concept. The participants range in artistic style and age, from six year olds through to adulthood.

After looking at Eva Hesse’s haunting figurative paintings, six and seven year olds manipulated the thick, globulous qualities of acrylic paint, resulting in the most wonderfully disturbing self portraits. Both dark and frivolously exuberant at the same time.

Fifteen to seventeen year olds explored the fragility of their own personal histories through portraiture. Writing secrets on rice paper, soft and perishable to the touch. Words hidden by the darkness surrounding the obscured figure of the artist.

In a particular class one of the younger students took his magnificent energy and channeled it into a painted mixed media sculpture inspired by contemporary works such as mounir fatmi’s Maximum Sensation. Flurries of green paint cover a very carefully propped toy car.