January 16 - February 20, 2010
Reception: January 23, 2010 4-6 PM
Craig
Krull Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of
self-portraits by Don Bachardy, one of the most celebrated portrait
artists of our time. Recognized for his extraordinarily deft, fluid,
and graphically concise portraits, Bachardy has rendered such figures
as Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, Cecil Beaton, Fred Astaire, John
Huston,
Fritz Lang, Ray Bradbury, Bette Davis, Igor Stravinsky, Natalie Wood,
Joan Didion, Ed Ruscha and Jack Nicholson. His portraits are always
from life, never from photographs.
in Los Angeles in 1934, Bachardy met his lifetime partner Christopher Isherwood in 1953 and they remained together until Isherwood’s death in 1986. Their home in Santa Monica Canyon became a salon for the local art world as well as a mecca for artists, writers and musicians visiting from abroad. A documentary on their life, Chris and Don; A Love Story, was produced in 2008.
The exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will present a selection of self-portraits created by Bachardy over a 50-year period, from 1959-2009. A passionate observer with an innate need to create, Bachardy notes that, “my self-portraits are most often done when a scheduled sitter has cancelled a sitting at the last moment. If I have a strong urge to work and can find no one ready to sit at short notice, I sometimes set up a mirror and paint myself.” This is a humble statement from an artist whose distinction in self-portraiture could be compared to Rembrandt or Van Gogh. In 2005, Bachardy was given a retrospective of his work at the Huntington Library, which also owns the archives of Christopher Isherwood.
As a compliment to the Bachardy exhibition, we will present a small selection of vintage Polaroid portraits of Marlon Brando, Richard Pryor and others made by the late Lucy Saroyan, the daughter of author William Saroyan.
Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of photographs of the Los Angeles River by Mark Swope. The son of noted TIME photographer John Swope, the younger Swope is a native Angeleno who has developed a keen sense of place in his photographic work. Swope’s interest in a paved urban river that has become “unincorporated, dormant and desolate” reflects an aesthetic and theoretical approach associated with the New Topographic photographers such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz. Writing about this work for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Daniel Hinerfeld has observed that the photographs appear to make “no attempt to glorify the river.... In some of his photographs the river is barely noticeable amidst the urban tumult. In others, the river shares the frame equally with the conduits of our industrial age: freeways, train tracks and high-tension wires.” A portion of the proceeds from this exhibition will benefit the NRDC.
in Los Angeles in 1934, Bachardy met his lifetime partner Christopher Isherwood in 1953 and they remained together until Isherwood’s death in 1986. Their home in Santa Monica Canyon became a salon for the local art world as well as a mecca for artists, writers and musicians visiting from abroad. A documentary on their life, Chris and Don; A Love Story, was produced in 2008.
The exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will present a selection of self-portraits created by Bachardy over a 50-year period, from 1959-2009. A passionate observer with an innate need to create, Bachardy notes that, “my self-portraits are most often done when a scheduled sitter has cancelled a sitting at the last moment. If I have a strong urge to work and can find no one ready to sit at short notice, I sometimes set up a mirror and paint myself.” This is a humble statement from an artist whose distinction in self-portraiture could be compared to Rembrandt or Van Gogh. In 2005, Bachardy was given a retrospective of his work at the Huntington Library, which also owns the archives of Christopher Isherwood.
As a compliment to the Bachardy exhibition, we will present a small selection of vintage Polaroid portraits of Marlon Brando, Richard Pryor and others made by the late Lucy Saroyan, the daughter of author William Saroyan.
Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of photographs of the Los Angeles River by Mark Swope. The son of noted TIME photographer John Swope, the younger Swope is a native Angeleno who has developed a keen sense of place in his photographic work. Swope’s interest in a paved urban river that has become “unincorporated, dormant and desolate” reflects an aesthetic and theoretical approach associated with the New Topographic photographers such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz. Writing about this work for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Daniel Hinerfeld has observed that the photographs appear to make “no attempt to glorify the river.... In some of his photographs the river is barely noticeable amidst the urban tumult. In others, the river shares the frame equally with the conduits of our industrial age: freeways, train tracks and high-tension wires.” A portion of the proceeds from this exhibition will benefit the NRDC.