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Delicatessen

Schmidt Center Gallery
November 9, 2007 - January 26, 2008

Artists in the Exhibition: Thordis Adalsteinsdottir, Diann Bauer, Jane Benson, Luisa Caldwell, Elaine Chow, William Cordova, Boyce Cummings, Tracy Emin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ellen Harvey, Jim Hodges, Jesper Just, Nina Katchadourian, Roxy Paine, Chloe Piene, Hunter Reynolds, Christina Lei Rodriguez, Jon Rosenbaum, Andrew Scott Ross, Shazia Sikander, Jordan Wolfson, Randy Wray.
Guest Curator: Diana Shpungin. (see image captions below)

Delicatessen features 22 internationally recognized and emerging artists working in diverse media. These artists explore a broad range of artistic approaches and subject matter but all embody an identifiable though elusive sensibility identified here as “Delicatessen.”  The exhibition includes artists working with material, subject matter or concepts often construed as traditionally beautiful, campy, kitsch, mundane, saccharine, sentimental, grotesque, or even dark and menacing. The artists play with and transform these associations through repetitive accumulation, strange juxtapositions and/or inventive assemblage. The artists challenge the original connotations of their chosen material or subject and walk a delicate line that transforms their work into something more potent, more engaging and sometimes even sublimely beautiful. The exhibition recoins the word delicatessen by bringing it back to its Latin roots, Delicatus, meaning  “giving pleasure, delight.”  This more poetic interpretation is pursued in the exhibition in contrast to the more familiar meaning related to food or commerce.  The exhibition challenges the somewhat utilitarian connotation of delicatessen as we know it, by presenting works that, despite their dissimilarities, consistently feature delicate sensibilities.Several artists will visit FAU to install their works, including Thordis Adalsteinsdottir who will create a new temporary work directly on the wall of the Schmidt Center Galler Public Space.

Clockwise from left: Tracy Emin, Good Smile Great Come, c-print, courtesy of the Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz Collection; Roxy Paine, Head Cheese, pigmented cast epoxy resins, courtesy of Graphic Arts Studio, Tampa; Jane Benson, Naked Swan (detail), taxidermy swan, silicon, oil paint, 2-way mirror plexi, courtesy of the artist and Black and White Gallery, NYC; Randy Wray, Dark Matter, steel, papier-mache, electric lights, resin, quartz crystals, epoxy clay, acrylic paint, glass glitter, courtesy of Black and White Gallery, NYC; Jesper Just, A Vicious Undertow, super 16mm transferred to video, courtesy of Perry Rubenstein Gallery, NYC.