Name: 102. Sara Issakharian, Her Twinkle in Their Eyes, 2023 by The Jewish Museum in Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration
Duration: 2 min 45 s
Description: Artist Sara Issakharian explains her thought process behind her creations

Color is flexible and amorphous, capable of taking on a multitude of forms. "Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration" presents new work by seven emerging artists who use supernatural color and uncanny luminescence to unsettle the figure. In painting, sculpture, and installation they push at and spill over the outermost limits of realism. Their high-key palettes and disorienting glow defamiliarize human and anthropomorphic forms, highlighting the figure’s manipulability and continual metamorphosis. These artists refute any fixed notions of the self and thwart reductive interpretations, generating space for resilient, transgressive, and exuberant bodies that cannot be placed or contained.

In their work, the artists take on and take in the oversaturation of our contemporary moment. They invoke surreal slippage between everyday horrors and their unbound imaginations. This multiethnic, multiracial, and otherwise multifaceted group of makers leverage palettes that reflect their cross-cultural allegiances and lived experiences—whether nodding to pop culture and digital immersion, the vibrancies of their heritages, or spaces of youthful and queer liberation. Modern and contemporary artists have long offered a counterpoint to strongholds within western art history that have insisted upon a muted palette as an indicator of purity, seriousness, and whiteness—since the Renaissance’s acute focus on linear perspective and recasting of classical sculpture in white. At a time of deep reconsideration of canons and institutions, this presentation reflects upon how color has been othered—perceived as emotional, subjective, and secondary to line in importance. The artists in "Overflow, Afterglow" embrace color to push against such hierarchies of value. Color lends itself to infinite perceptions and refuses to be definitive.

"Overflow, Afterglow" builds on the Jewish Museum’s history of exploring contemporary art in real time, providing a platform for new generations of artists. This exhibition upholds its artists’ fullest selves, as well as those of our many diverse constituents. Taken together, their works convey the frenzied too-muchness and all-at-onceness, in-betweenness and expansiveness of the present day, ultimately communicating interlinked experiences across many spectrums.

Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration

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Artist Sara Issakharian explains her thought process behind her creations

102. Sara Issakharian, Her Twinkle in Their Eyes, 2023

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Color is flexible and amorphous, capable of taking on a multitude of forms. Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration presents new work by seven emerging artists who use supernatural color and uncanny luminescence to unsettle the figure. In painting, sculpture, and installation they push at and spill over the outermost limits of realism. Their high-key palettes and disorienting glow defamiliarize human and anthropomorphic forms, highlighting the figure’s manipulability and continual metamorphosis. These artists refute any fixed notions of the self and thwart reductive interpretations, generating space for resilient, transgressive, and exuberant bodies that cannot be placed or contained.

In their work, the artists take on and take in the oversaturation of our contemporary moment. They invoke surreal slippage between everyday horrors and their unbound imaginations. This multiethnic, multiracial, and otherwise multifaceted group of makers leverage palettes that reflect their cross-cultural allegiances and lived experiences—whether nodding to pop culture and digital immersion, the vibrancies of their heritages, or spaces of youthful and queer liberation. Modern and contemporary artists have long offered a counterpoint to strongholds within western art history that have insisted upon a muted palette as an indicator of purity, seriousness, and whiteness—since the Renaissance’s acute focus on linear perspective and recasting of classical sculpture in white. At a time of deep reconsideration of canons and institutions, this presentation reflects upon how color has been othered—perceived as emotional, subjective, and secondary to line in importance. The artists in Overflow, Afterglow embrace color to push against such hierarchies of value. Color lends itself to infinite perceptions and refuses to be definitive.

Overflow, Afterglow builds on the Jewish Museum’s history of exploring contemporary art in real time, providing a platform for new generations of artists. This exhibition upholds its artists’ fullest selves, as well as those of our many diverse constituents. Taken together, their works convey the frenzied too-muchness and all-at-onceness, in-betweenness and expansiveness of the present day, ultimately communicating interlinked experiences across many spectrums.

101. Curators' Introduction

James Snyder, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director welcomes you to the exhibition

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102. Sara Issakharian, Her Twinkle in Their Eyes, 2023

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