In Our Image: The Fragile Body in Contemporary Art
Artists have long used the human figure to reflect on societal anxieties and psychological traumas. In Our Image: The Fragile Body in Contemporary Art brings this tendency into the present moment. By gathering works from The Rachofsky Collection and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora collection, alongside private and institutional loans, the exhibition draws on the human form as a window into individual identity, psychology, and consciousness. Here, the figure is not a symbol of perfection, but rather, a site of striving.
These works adopt vulnerability as a throughline, posing the fragile human body as a site for storytelling. At times animal or automated, these works rely on moments of fallibility as a lens with which to reframe the nature of contemporary selfhood. Placing work from different cultural contexts in conversation, the exhibition looks at the vulnerable body as both a stage for the self, and a reflection of society.
The introductory gallery reimagines the classical sculpture garden, bringing together figurative works across space and time. Many works reject classical Western conceptions of beauty in favor of highlighting the body’s inherent imperfection and impermanence. A gallery devoted to Robert Gober examines fragmentation and distortion, seen in sculptures where the body appears as both a domestic object and a fractured part of a larger system. At once familiar and unsettling, his work is a haunting meditation on fragility and, with it, mortality.
Other galleries are organized thematically, exploring questions connected to an implied, spectral, or absent body; the human impulse for movement and performance; the puppet as a surrogate to be controlled and manipulated; the corporeal body; the costumed figure; and the digital and dematerialized self. Throughout the exhibition, the material body remains a vulnerable, yet mysterious, presence.
Seen together, these works reflect the all-too-human—fragile, mutable, unpleasant, flawed, and existential. The exhibition foregrounds the body’s inherent contradictions: its precarity and its strength, its ability to appear both personal and universal, its familiarity and its strangeness. Many seem to emerge from the artists’ unconscious, each a meditation on the human form that blurs the boundaries between art and life. As rapid developments in technology continue to challenge, flatten, and dematerialize our understanding of what it means to be human, this exhibition returns to the material body as a grounding site, one that, while imperfect and impermanent, is ultimately hopeful.
These works adopt vulnerability as a throughline, posing the fragile human body as a site for storytelling. At times animal or automated, these works rely on moments of fallibility as a lens with which to reframe the nature of contemporary selfhood. Placing work from different cultural contexts in conversation, the exhibition looks at the vulnerable body as both a stage for the self, and a reflection of society.
The introductory gallery reimagines the classical sculpture garden, bringing together figurative works across space and time. Many works reject classical Western conceptions of beauty in favor of highlighting the body’s inherent imperfection and impermanence. A gallery devoted to Robert Gober examines fragmentation and distortion, seen in sculptures where the body appears as both a domestic object and a fractured part of a larger system. At once familiar and unsettling, his work is a haunting meditation on fragility and, with it, mortality.
Other galleries are organized thematically, exploring questions connected to an implied, spectral, or absent body; the human impulse for movement and performance; the puppet as a surrogate to be controlled and manipulated; the corporeal body; the costumed figure; and the digital and dematerialized self. Throughout the exhibition, the material body remains a vulnerable, yet mysterious, presence.
Seen together, these works reflect the all-too-human—fragile, mutable, unpleasant, flawed, and existential. The exhibition foregrounds the body’s inherent contradictions: its precarity and its strength, its ability to appear both personal and universal, its familiarity and its strangeness. Many seem to emerge from the artists’ unconscious, each a meditation on the human form that blurs the boundaries between art and life. As rapid developments in technology continue to challenge, flatten, and dematerialize our understanding of what it means to be human, this exhibition returns to the material body as a grounding site, one that, while imperfect and impermanent, is ultimately hopeful.