BANGOR — The University of Maine Museum of Art, 40 Harlow St. in downtown Bangor, will have on display April 3-June 6 three new exhibitions, including work by Andy Warhol:
- “Andy Warhol: Photographs and Screenprints”
Andy Warhol was the principal figure of American Pop Art and known for elevating aspects of popular culture and consumerism into the realm of “high art.” “Photographs and Screenprints” will showcase two recent gifts to UMMA’s permanent collection from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. in New York City, and marks the first time many of these works have been seen in Maine.
Included are Warhol’s screenprints of Sitting Bull, Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen and the artist’s iconic “Flowers, 1970.” Also featured is a selection of gelatin silver prints and Polaroid images of celebrities and socialites, including Farrah Fawcett, Candy Spelling, Pia Zadora and Margaret Hamilton (also know as the Wicked Witch of the West), and others.
“Andy Warhol: Photographs and Screenprints” is funded in part by the University of Maine Cultural Affairs/Distinguished Lecture Series Fund.
- Elizabeth Livingston: Dark Houses”
New York-based artist Elizabeth Livingston often paints lone women in suburban and rural environments. While these women are depicted among the luxuries and comfort of domestic life, there is a feeling of isolation and an ominous undercurrent present in the paintings. As reflected in self-portraits of the artist sleeping nestled under plush bedding, Livingston points out that, “we are most vulnerable when we feel the most protected.” In these works, the artist places the viewer in the position of voyeur. We peer as if through a window into comfortable abodes for a glimpse of the inhabitants often pictured against backdrops of richly patterned wallpaper and domestic objects.
In Livingston’s recent scenes of country homes, where porch lights glow in a darkened landscape, she suggests, “they are both safe houses and defenseless outposts about to be consumed by night.”
- “Jennifer Caine: Amnesia”
Often using oil paint combined with marble dust to achieve lustrous matte surfaces, Jennifer Caine’s paintings emerge from an accumulation of layers. While her works initially may find inspiration from specific memories, elements from the environment or the line of a poem, the references become unrecognizable as they are embedded in the strata of paint. Layers are built up and stripped away through scraping and sanding to expose colors and marks from earlier iterations. Caine’s paintings are rooted in the passage of time, memory and the physical world. The artist states, “As memory is fluid and labile, so are my paintings, informed by current decisions as well as by the history and legacy of the underlying layers.”