Pictured: Gina Beavers: Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh as rendered in Bacon, 2016, acrylic on canvas on panel, 22 by 32 inches. Courtesy Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York.
This group show is curated by artist Brian Belott, who asked twenty-four artists to respond to the work of masters from Giotto to Courbet. The results are at times reverent: Alex Chaves’s color-blocked, floral still life is a vivid tribute to Matisse. Some artists created two-bit knockoffs. Ajay Kurian reproduces William Blake’s iconographic The Ancient of Days in pink velvet and glitter, while Melissa Brown includes a lottery scratch-off in her faux-naïf adaptation of Hans Holbein’s illusionistic 1533 masterpiece The Ambassadors. Others couldn’t resist a joke at their forebears’ expense. Painter Gina Beavers contributes a heavily built-up version of van Gogh’s Starry Night that looks as if it is composed of strips of bacon. Visitors have the pleasure of taking in exuberant new paintings and testing their art historical memory, enjoying two artworks separated by centuries at once. —Julia Wolkoff
Pictured: Gina Beavers: Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh as rendered in Bacon, 2016, acrylic on canvas on panel, 22 by 32 inches. Courtesy Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York.