Portraits collected by Dubuffet and paintings of natural world come to WFU’s Hanes Gallery

Note to Media: Photos of works in these exhibits are available by email. Please call the News Service to request them.

Painting by Nancy MladenoffWake Forest University’s Charlotte and Philip Hanes Art Gallery will present, “Portraits and Personnages: Selected Works from the Collection de l’Art Brut’s Neuve Invention,” Feb. 8-March 24 in the Downstairs Gallery. Another exhibit, “nu nature,” will be shown in the Upstairs Gallery.

An opening reception for these exhibits will be held Feb. 7 at 3 p.m. in the Hanes Gallery, located in the Scales Fine Arts Center. It is free and open to the public.

“Portraits and Personnages” features 50 works on paper that depict portraits or human characterizations. The exhibit pieces come from the personal art collection of the late French modern artist Jean Dubuffet, which he called “the Collection de l’Art Brut.” He opened the collection in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1976, to display works by artists he discovered on the margins of society. He felt these works were important because he thought the artists were motivated by personal creative passion and worked independently of the dictated tradition and fashion of their day.

A slide lecture about the exhibit will be held Feb. 8 at noon in Scales Fine Arts Center, Room 102. Tom Stanley, co-curator of the exhibit and the director of Winthrop University Galleries in Rock Hill, S.C., will present the lecture. It is free and open to the public.

The late Genevieve Roulin also curated this exhibit. She was the curator at the Collection de l’Art Brut until her death in 2001.

The second exhibit, “nu nature,” is a collection of mixed media paintings by Nancy Mladenoff, an American artist who teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The paintings in this exhibit examine the love/hate relationship between beings in the natural world, particularly that between insects and fungi.

A slide lecture on this exhibit will be held on Feb. 6 at 3 p.m. in Scales Fine Arts Center, Room 102. It is free and open to the public.
The Hanes Gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, and from 1-5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. It is closed during university holidays. Admission is free.

For more information, call 336-758-5585.

Categories: Arts & Culture, Events