New exhibits open at the University Art Museum

	Julie Heffernan "Self-Portrait as Netherworld", 2004 Oil on canvas 60 x 52 inches.

The University Art Museum is pleased to present two concurrent exhibitions that will run from August 30 through November 12, 2006. The opening reception will be September 19th from 5-7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Julie Heffernan: Everything That Rises, an exhibition that spans the career of one of contemporary painting's most skilled and visionary practitioners, uses traditional motifs borrowed from a range of art historical references including Flemish landscapes, 17th-century portraiture, and Rococo interiors. Heffernan's paintings evoke the skill of the old masters, yet belong completely to this moment. Her unpredictable and highly imaginative imagery speaks to her abiding interest in issues of gender, class structure, personal narrative, and art historical convention. It is a body of work that continues to engage, delight and confound, filling even the most sophisticated viewer with a sense of wonder.

Lavishly painted and undeniably beautiful, Heffernan's work lures us to worlds where nothing is simple, and where the overripe lushness of a single piece of fruit holds the promise of meaning beyond rational thought.

	JoAnne Carson

Flicker features work by five contemporary artists whose work references the ephemeral and contradictory impulses of the Baroque era. By reinvigorating faded stylistic conventions associated with portraiture, ornamentation, and architectural design, these artists explore how the vestiges of an era more heroic than our own continue to haunt the contemporary imagination. The artists are JoAnne Carson, Jeff Davis, Timothy Horn, Bettina Sellmann, and Kevin Zucker.

In an effort to link the present with the past, these artists penetrate stylistic conventions in search of something more complex and felt. Set within the University Art Museum's modernist exhibition space designed by Edward Durell Stone, the excessiveness of these works provides a striking contrast to their architectural backdrop. Flicker unites the seemingly oppositional historical forces of modernism and the baroque era by highlighting the futile quest for perfectionism that underlies both sensibilities.
 

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