birth of the cool

The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston  in The Brown Foundation gallery is featured:

Barkley Hendricks: Birth of the Cool

 

Best known for his life-sized portraits of ordinary people living in his urban northeast community of Connecticut, Barkley L. Hendricks’s bold portrayal of his subject’s attitude and style elevates the common man and woman to celebrity status. 

Birth of the Cool is the first painting retrospective of the American artist, and includes over 50 works from 1964 to the present.

Hendricks’s stylistic renderings connect the art movements of American realism and post-modernism while touching upon many of the art movements of the 1960s and 70s—pop art, photorealism, minimalism, even black aesthetic nationalism. His work occupies a space somewhere between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. Cool, empowering and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks's artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today's younger generation of artists.

Sweet Thang

more after the jump...

Go check him out!!