 | Painter Gabrielle Bakker is inspired by a wide variety of art: Asian, Modernist, and Renaissance. For the last ten years, she has been working on a series of paintings in which all of these disparate sources combine in a completely original blend. The result is an exhibition, reviewed here by KUOW's art critic, Gary Faigin, in which the push and pull of tradition and innovation, depth and flatness, the familiar and the bizarre, makes for some fascinating viewing. We are awash in a sea of images, but few artists celebrate this condition as enthusiastically as Gabrielle Bakker. Her recent work makes a virtue of its eclecticism, cobbling together highly original pictures from a huge array of sources, whose only common element is that the artist finds them worthy. It is one thing to appreciate art and artists from places as disparate as Classical Rome and Greece, Renaissance Italy and Flanders, and early 20th Century Paris; it is quite another to attempt to put together coherent pictures in which all of these influences – and more – are in play. |
