Exhibitions collected by subject matter rather than era, style or artist bring something unexpected to the study of art.
In Nude: Art from the Tate, showing now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, you feel it keenly: there are more than 100 works in this collection, spanning more than two centuries, from Rodin’s marble masterwork The Kiss to the candid photographs of Cindy Sherman.
It is eclectic and sprawling but it doesn’t feel arbitrary. Rather, the effect is not only to show how depictions of the human body have changed but, perhaps more importantly, to provide a map for the semiconscious and subconscious shifting in modes of thought and artistic expression across time.
Visual art is often a kind of guerrilla emotional trigger: I’m always taken aback by how exhausting it is, no matter how much of it I see. Perhaps part of the reason for that is the necessary concentration, the absorption, the stillness required to open yourself up to the intellectual and emotional labour of both recognising the context of the work and attempting to reorient your own perspective: to understand not only what the artist sees but how and why they see it.
Nude: Art from the Tate contains everything from the prim to the pornographic but, after leaving the exhibition, I find myself still mulling over two works in particular.
The first is Cecily Brown’s Trouble in Paradise. The mastery of the composition doesn’t necessarily reveal itself upon first glance; it is the kind of work that deepens in complexity the longer you look. It is a response to the perceived “violence” in Willem de Kooning’s The Visit (also on display) and, in the same vein, it appears to shift constantly even as you hold it in your eye.
Faces and limbs surface and are reabsorbed into the swirling mess of paint-flesh; at times it feels as if what is on the canvas is not paint all but a blurred and manipulated photograph coming into focus for only a moment before plunging back into the mess and whorl of thick oils.
The second is Ron Mueck’s Wild Man. This is truly an extraordinary piece of sculpture; a tiny giant, his anxiety fills the room and to stare at the remarkable composition – the patterns of hair follicles, the curl of his toenails, the whiteness of his knuckles and his wide, fearful eyes – is only to further increase his terror.
The detail and the scale of the work feed off each other: it’s overwhelming, moving and a must-see in person.
• Nude: Art from the Tate is open at the Art Gallery of NSW until 5 February 2017
