the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
PREVIEW
"Contemporaries
Take a Fresh Look at Mona Lisa"
September/
October, 2006
Contemporaries Take a Fresh Look at Mona Lisa
Buying a work of art for a museum collection can be a heady business, and the NCMA Contemporaries took on the challenge. Over the past five years, the Museum's young professionals membership group has purchased much-needed but less daunting items for the Museum, including folding chairs, a dance floor, and cocktail tables. This year they decided to "raise the bar."
In January 2006 Curator of Contemporary Art Linda Dougherty provided the Contemporaries a series of presentations on the works of 11 contemporary artists whom the Museum was interested in adding to the permanent collection. After discussing the artists and their works, the Contemporaries board members narrowed their prospect list to two pieces and arranged for them to be shipped and temporarily installed at the Museum. In June board members Hanna Compton and Amy Rogers chaired an art purchase party at which current Contemporaries members viewed the works and cast their votes for the final selection.
The Contemporaries chose an installation by New York-based artist Devorah Sperber titled After The Mona Lisa 2. This work comprises 5,184 multi-colored spools of thread (manufactured in North Carolina) that re-create a detail from Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting. Sperber has transformed one of the most well-known works in the history of art by inverting and enlarging it over 200 times to 85 by 87 inches. Viewing the work through an acrylic sphere that is part of the installation mimics peripheral vision, turning the image right side up and shrinking it back to a recognizable size. In her work Sperber explores the rreporduction of images in the digital era, links between art and technoloby, and visual perception-how the eye and brain make sense of the visual world. After The Mona Lisa 2 will be formally gifted to the Museum in September and installed this fall in the modern and Contemporary Gallery.
