Stavanger, Norway
As artists well know, but the rest of us often forget, human skin comes in an extraordinary range of colors, far beyond beiges and browns and blacks. Kerry James Marshall, the great African American painter, has made it his life’s work to explore this in terms of dark skin, the subtleties of which have long been ignored in Western art history. Vibeke Andersen is having a fine time of it with Norwegians, who, it turns out, contain various shades of red, grey, yellow, green, and blue in their flesh. Two portraits bear this out with exceptional variety, due to her subject having taken a bad fall and suffered much bruising to his face. One is pastel on paper, the other an astonishing embroidery on a large panel of rough, stitched-together cloth. Andersen prefers the term “painting with thread” to embroidery, and she is quite correct. Her friend emerges via an additive process, out of a combination of many different hues, each a single mark. The effect is also dimensional, less like a sculptural bas-relief and more like a painting where the artist has gone heavy at the canvas with a palette knife. Here that volume is especially felt in the eyes, which bulge convexly on one side and concavely on the other, an uncanny aspect that continues as the thousands of threads come to feel cellular, vein-like, molecular—just like the components of a human being. As for this particular person, he may not be happy, and he seems to be in some pain, but at least he is also a rainbow.
—Lori Waxman, March 16, 5:06 PM