"A Mae West Experience" - in Cleveland

"A Mae West Experience" - a painting [2002] by artist Michael Borremans

We're all trained from childhood to read pictures like stories. But the pictures of Belgian artist Michael Borremans don't work that way. Full as they are with seemingly narrative elements, they're deliberately befuddling. That's part of what makes them so mesmerizing. Borremans' exhibition, "Hallucination and Reality," on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through Sunday, Sept. 4, is a magnificent example of how an artist can take historical conventions and use them to make works that feel entirely new.
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Drawing upon influences ranging from Renaissance drawing to Surrealism, Borremans creates hauntingly beautiful drawings and paintings that lure viewers like glass-encased gemstones.
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Rather than creating stories, he combines disparate images so that they read like dreams or nightmares.
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A painting from 2002 titled "A Mae West Experience," for instance, shows a bust of the famous screen siren as if it were a public monument. Comparatively tiny figures appear to walk around the statue, though many are depicted as figurines, each mounted to a round base and therefore immobile. Though the implied space in the painting is wide open, the frame of a doorway appears on the periphery, as if leading viewers from one realm into another.
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The show is Michael Borremans' first solo museum exhibition in the United States, and the Cleveland museum is its only American venue. It opened last fall in Switzerland and traveled to Belgium before opening in Cleveland on May 22. Co-curated by Jeffrey Grove, who left his post as . . . .
- excerpt from Michael Borremans: 'Hallucination and Reality' delightfully puzzling -
ART
Monday, June 06, 2005
Dan Tranberg
Special to The Plain Dealer
- excerpt from Michael Borremans: 'Hallucination & Reality' delightfully puzzling -
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