Boston Flora

Tag: McMullen Museum

  • Through Sunday, June 3 – Cao Jun: Hymns to Nature

    Cao Jun was born in 1966 and raised in Jiangsu Province in southern China, where the lakes and rivers shaped his childhood environment. For eighteen years he studied and worked near Mount Tai, one of China’s most ancient places of worship and ceremonial ritual. Concrete experience of both aquatic sites and mountainous terrain informed Cao Jun’s approach to artistic creation. After formal training in Beijing, he settled in New Zealand yet traveled throughout Europe and the United States. More recently he journeyed to the polar regions and northern Alaska.

    Hymns to Nature is Cao Jun’s first exhibition in the United States. It examines the deep roots of his art in the experience of nature and how he portrays our place within it. It also illuminates his novel responses to admired, earlier paintings by his countrymen, encouraging us to ponder a dynamic dialogue between Chinese art of the past and that of the present.

    Arranged thematically, the exhibition opens with his early works depicting wild animals. It moves on to later paintings where he employs the techniques of ink- and color-splashing to render mountain landscapes, water, and flowers. Subsequent areas display his calligraphy and porcelain. The exhibition concludes with more recent abstract works exploring the various configurations in which spatial phenomena can appear.

    Hymns to Nature is accompanied by a catalogue, edited by John Sallis, with contributions by Chinese and American scholars that examine the ways in which Cao Jun’s art fuses elements of classical Chinese painting with modern abstract forms akin to those of Western art. Essays also discuss the philosophical and poetic dimensions of the artist’s work, as well as Cao Jun’s profound connections to the natural world.

    Organized by the McMullen Museum, Hymns to Nature has been curated by John Sallis and underwritten by Boston College with major support from the Patrons of the McMullen Museum.​ The show may be seen in the Daley Family and Monan Galleries at Boston College through June 3.  For more information visit https://www.bc.edu/sites/artmuseum/exhibitions/cao-jun/

  • Through Sunday, December 10 – Nature’s Mirror: Reality and Symbol in Belgian Landscape

    Since the Renaissance, art in the region of Belgium and the nearby Netherlands has been known for innovations in realistic representation of visual appearances and for an extraordinary fluency in symbolism. The development of landscape as an independent genre was fostered by new market forces and artistic concerns in Belgium in the sixteenth century, and landscape emerged as a major focus for nineteenth-century realist and symbolist artists. Nature’s Mirror: Reality and Symbol in Belgian Landscape traces these landmark developments with a rich array of seldom-seen works.

    Illustrating the birth of landscape art, Nature’s Mirror opens with important prints and drawings by artists like Pieter Bruegel, Hieronymus Cock, Paul Brill, and Roelandt Savery (landscape pictured below). The exhibition then explores the evolving dialogue between subjective experience and the external world by featuring major modern works by artists from the School of Tervuren and symbolists including Fernand Khnopff and William Degouve de Nuncques.

    Displaying more than 120 works, many from the leading private collection of Belgian art in America, the Hearn Family Trust, Nature’s Mirror examines the wealth of artistic expression that bloomed in the regions of Belgium in an unprecedented fashion.

    Boston College’s McMullen Museum’s exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue edited by Jeffery Howe, with essays by American and Belgian scholars that examine artists such as Fernand Khnopff and Léon Spilliaert within the regional contexts that strongly influenced them. Other contributions discuss the transition of Belgian realism to symbolism, George Minne’s poetic illustrations, and themes of industrialization and labor.

    Organized by the McMullen Museum, Nature’s Mirror has been curated by Jeffery Howe and underwritten by Boston College with major support from the Patrons of the McMullen Museum and Mary Ann and Vincent Q. Giffuni. The show, in the Daley Family Gallery, will be on view through December 10. For more information visit http://www.bc.edu/sites/artmuseum/exhibitions/natures-mirror/

  • Through Sunday, May 31 – The Book As Art

    The Book as Art, Artists’ Books From the National Museum of Women in the Arts, presents four decades of artists’ books by the medium’s finest female practitioners from around the world.  These works are inspired by lives d’artiste-deluxe, books illustrated with prints by such celebrated artists as Georges Rouault and Pablo Picasso.  By the end of the twentieth century artists’ books had moved away from the traditional codex format.  Examples on display, often sculptural in form, reveal an innovative interweaving of image and text through the use of a broad range of media, materials, and techniques.  Hours are weekdays 11 – 4, weekends noon – 5 pm, McMullen Museum of Art, Devlin Hall, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, at Boston College.  Closed May 25, 2009 (Memorial Day). Admission is free. For directions and more information, email arts@bc.edu, log on to www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/artmuseum/or call 617-552-8100.