The Hunterdon Art Museum this week unveiled three new exhibitions open to the public: “Portrait of the Artist,” “Cristina de Gennaro: Sage Drawings,” and “Tricia Zimic: Sins & Virtues.”
“Portrait of the Artist,” on view through April 30, explores the ways in which artists interpret themselves and the world around them through portraiture.
The exhibition features the work of: Mary Beth McKenzie, a realist painter who works from life; Sarah McEneaney, an autobiographical painter who documents her life and surroundings; Judith Brodsky, whose self-portraits during the pandemic lockdown reflect on her isolation and restrictions; Julie Heffernan, who expresses her growing concern for the environment; and Judith Henry, who juxtaposes images of fashion models’ faces with her own.
Even when the artists in this exhibition portray other artists, they reference self-portraiture, with their subjects consciously posing as artists. Rodríguez Calero reinterprets a well-known self-portrait by Puerto Rican artist José Campeche. Donna Bassin’s “My Own Witness” features photographs of artist friends with objects meaningful to their practices.
“Cristina de Gennaro: Sage Drawings,” on view through April 30, showcases five works from de Gennaro’s series of landscape drawings of the high desert floor that began during a fellowship at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, N.M.
The drawings depict eroding sagebrush, weeds, and parched soil and examine the tension between the sublime and the abject. De Gennaro photographs panoramic views of the desert floor and uses charcoal to draw the organic systems on Mylar.
“Tricia Zimic: Sins & Virtues,” on view through March 5, spotlights nine white porcelain sculptures of Chacma baboons depicting the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Virtues. The sculptures, part of Zimic’s “Sins & Virtues” series, are one-of-a-kind and hand-modeled, with the individual personality of each animal and artwork revealed through the development of fine details.
Zimic was inspired to create these porcelain sculptures after visiting the Dresden Porcelain Collection and the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory, and drew inspiration from Johann Joachim Kaendler’s 18th-century “Monkey Orchestra,” a series of elaborately hand-painted monkey figurines from Meissen’s Rococo era.
The museum is located at 7 Lower Center St., Clinton, N.J. The galleries are open to the public 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. For information about visiting, see hunterdonartmuseum.org/visitor-information.
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