New bodies, same strange

Strange Bodies, the smart presentation of figurative works from the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (though a few are borrowed) that premiered in January, has gotten a bit of a face-and-everything-else-lift. Since the beginning of the summer, new pieces have been introduced to the body-concious-and-them-some show so memorably filling the basement of the Hirsh. Though many of the creators are familiar — Rene Magritte, Francis Bacon, Julian Schnabel, Willem de Kooning — their thoughtful juxtaposition here continues to uncover connections that surprise even Kristen Hileman, the curator responsible for the show.

Consider her deft positioning of Ron Mueck’s giant sculpture “Untitled (Big Man)” near John Currin’s 1999 painting of two nude women of classical antiquity, “The Pink Tree.”

“Traditionally there’s a longer history of portraying female nudes and having them represent an ideal of beauty,” Hileman explains. “Versus representing a heavy, bulky male nude, and having that figure represent an unidealized version of the human body.”

She cites Lucian Freud’s male nude around the corner as another example of how “contemporary artists are interested in unidealized forms of the figure, in addition to figures that might be considered typically beautiful.”

Obscuring figuration to heighten its emotionality is a common technique here, particularly in the early-20th-century pieces by the likes of Bacon, Alberto Giacometti and de Kooning.

“Artists can select parts of the body, or depict the body in a scenario that doesn’t give us the information we need to read a photographic image,” Hileman says. “It leaves a lot of room for our imaginations to kick in.”