Announcing Representation: Eleanor Antin

Sept. 28, 2018

Diane Rosenstein Gallery is proud to announce representation of iconic Conceptual artist Eleanor Antin. Antin draws from fictional characters, autobiography, and theatrical narrative to examine the ways in which history and identity take shape, and to scrutinize the role that visual representation plays in that process.

 

Eleanor Antin has created two solo exhibitions for the gallery – Passengers (2014) and What time is it? (2016) -- and was included in Unsparing Quality (curated by Farrah Karapetian) in 2014. Passengers (2014) presented watercolors, works on paper, and photographs dating from her earliest Roissy (1967) collages to recent large-scale photographs such as Roman Allegories (2004) and Helen's Odyssey (2007)The gallery published a limited edition chapbook to accompany Passengers (with an essay by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp).

 

For What time is it? (2016), her second gallery exhibition, Antin recreated two groundbreaking installations of conceptual portraiture – CALIFORNIA LIVES (1969) and Portraits Of Eight New York Women (1970) – using consumer goods. These sculptures used everyday products and household objects to create metaphorical portraits of both known and fictional characters in the artist's world at the time.

 

ELEANOR ANTIN (US, b. 1935) received a BA from City College of New York (CCNY) in 1958. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1997). Antin is Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD).

 

Eleanor Antin is recognized as a profoundly influential Conceptual artist. Her photographs, video and performance-based works such as Representational Painting (1971), CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture (1972), and 100 Boots(1971-73) are icons of 20th century avant-garde art. Her character-based persona works such as The King Of Solano BeachThe Ballerina, The Angel of Mercy, and The Nurse and The Hijackers engages video, performance, photography, sculpture, installation and drawing in a ground-breaking approach to identity-based narrative. Since 2001, she has created large photographic tableaux of narrative and allegorical scenes (often from an imagined ancient Rome), shown as The Last Days of Pompeii and Helen's Odyssey.

 

Recently, Eleanor Antin has completed a major new work -- Time's Arrow -- in which she revisits CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture in a reenactment of the self-portrait documentation, now as an 83 year-old woman. Time's Arrow will be exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in May, 2019.

In 1999, LACMA held a retrospective of Antin's work, sponsored by Fellows Of Contemporary Art (FOCA) and curated by Howard Fox. In 2008, the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) exhibited a solo survey of her recent large format photographs in Eleanor Antin: Historical Takes. In 2013, Multiple Occupancy: Eleanor Antin's "Selves"(curated by Emily Liebert) was exhibited at The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, NY and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston (2014).

Numerous one-woman exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was included in the Venice Biennale (1976) and Documenta 12 (2007). Antin's artwork is represented in many important public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Tate Modern (UK), Museum Of Contemporary Art (MOCA), The Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Jewish Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), Centre Pompidou (France), and Sammlung Verbund Collection (Austria).

Published books include Being Antinova (Astro Artz/Hirmer Verlag), Eleanora Antinova Plays (Sun & Moon Press), Man Without A World: a Screenplay (Green Integer, Sun & Moon Press), Conversations With Stalin (Green Integer); and An Artist’s Life by Eleanora Antinova (Hirmer Verlag, Munich) in 2016.

Eleanor Antin is represented by Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York and Richard Saltoun, London.

 Eleanor Antin lives and works in San Diego, California.