GROUP EXHIBITION

Long before the term Rückenfigur was popularized in the nineteenth century by Caspar David Friedrich, painters andsculptors from as far back as antiquity deployed the human figure seen from behind as a conceptual and formal device.Rear View provides a lens onto this specific genre as it pertains to artists’ desire to capture a range of human states andemotions—contemplation, longing, voyeurism, refusal, fetishism, and defiance—while drawing our attention to theact of looking itself and to the viewer’s role in constructing meaning and identity.

Many contemporary artists have engaged the Rückenfigur trope, deliberately harnessing its critical potential. In oneof the most compelling examples, Carrie Mae Weems has photographed herself in canonical landscapes and chargedhistorical sites over many years, as a means of addressing complex issues around race, gender, and class, while alsosubjecting the signature paradigm of Romanticism to radical, politicized revision.

From the idealized bodies celebrated in Hellenistic sculpture to the bathers glimpsed in snapshot-like paintings anddrawings by Impressionists and early modernists, images of nude bodies portrayed from behind have been integralto the unfolding story of figuration in the West. Urs Fischer directly quotes the Classical origins of this art historicalparadigm in a monumental new candle sculpture made specifically for Rear View. Divine Interventions (2023) reprisesone of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roman marble Three Graces (second century CE), turning the trio of iconicfeminine paragons, Aglaia (Beauty), Euphrosyne (Mirth), and Thalia (Abundance), into ephemeral forms cast in wax.Admiring this sculptural group—and in essence joining the Graces—is a wax effigy of Pauline Karpidas, the legendarycontemporary art patron who once owned the ancient work that the Met would come to acquire.

The eroticism of “rear view” images emerges not only from the frisson of nudity—the iconography of the humanderrière emerges as a whole transhistorical subject onto itself—but from the narrative implication of intimacybetween the depicted subject and the artist, the viewer’s fantasizing gaze and the sensuousness of the image on canvas.The trope of the mirror, the ritual of bathing, and the lounging or sleeping body are typical rear view scenarios takenup by artists across the centuries—from Edgar Degas to René Magritte, from Félix Vallotton to Barkley L. Hendricks,through to our present day. Fernando Botero’s painting The Bathroom (1989) features a woman, at once monumental and delicate, gazing at herself in the mirror, wearing only heels and a headband. The figure’s unselfconscious posturesuggests she is unaware of the artist, invested only in herself.

By contrast, John Currin’s Nude in a Convex Mirror (2015) looks over her shoulder, presumably at the painter who isdepicting the curves of her accentuated buttocks—but also at the viewer observing the action. The subject of PaulCadmus’s c. 1965 crayon drawing Standing Male Nude (NM 48) likewise peeks over his shoulder at the artist and theviewer, but with a loaded glance and flirtatious pose—one foot ever so slightly lifted to reveal its sole—that encodea sexual charge of mutual male gazes into an otherwise classical image. Jared French, who was part of the homosocialcircle of artists around Cadmus, are represented in the exhibition by emblematic, dreamlike paintings populateduniquely by idealized male figures. The performative signifiers of masculinity emerge as an important subtheme ofRear View, evident in Giorgio de Chirico’s hyper-stylized Gladiatori (1928), Francis Bacon’s tormented figure in _Study_for Portrait of John Edwards (1986), and Andy Warhol’s abstracted depiction of a butch man’s hind quarters.

In their foreclosure of a complete picture, turned figures such as Currin’s nude also signal fetishism, another themeexplored in Rear View. A number of works in the exhibition illuminate ways in which contemporary painting hasabsorbed the cinematic motif of the rear view, translating the camerawork of film noir and Hitchcockian thrillerslike Rear Window (1954) into paint on canvas or rich black-and-white photographic images. Eric Fischl and DanielleMckinney, for example, draw upon our collective cinematic imagination in composing their deeply narrative scenes,often populated by mysterious figures shown from the back and seemingly unaware of being observed. By contrast,but with no less enigmatic intensity, Harry Callahan’s mid-century rear-view photographs of his beloved wife,Eleanor, testify to the impact of cinematic vision when personalized to a single, deceptively simple subject. details of the figure, this painting reveals Gnoli’s seeming uninterest in the body, except as a support for signifyingornament.

The fragmented, fetishized human body emerged as a loaded trope in art history, according to esteemed feministscholar Linda Nochlin in her study The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (1994). Spurred by theviolence and social upheaval of the French Revolution, Nochlin notes, artists began to systematically deploy radicalspatial cropping as well as isolating specific body parts, in order to explore the specific conditions of modern urbanlife—alienation, desire, suffering, obsession, ambiguous anonymous experiences. Nochlin’s observations find acontemporary echo in Issy Wood’s intimate canvas on view in the exhibition: Health and hotness (2018) shows onlythe muscular back and bottom of a swimmer framed by her purple bathing suit. Wood’s enigmatic image is also ameditation on the impact of compressed and splitting planes and shapes—a study of the body as an abstraction.

Political refusal and personal irreverence also figure into art historical manifestations of the rear view. Sixphotographs from Anselm Kiefer’s polemical 1969 series Occupations (Besetzungen) take up this political mantle.In this series, the young artist photographed himself—often shown from behind, mimicking the heroic stance ofFriedrich’s Rückenfigur—performing the Nazi salute in front of European monuments and natural sites. Of the series,controversial then as now, art historian Benjamin Buchloh remarked that it is ‘a real working through of Germanhistory. You have to inhabit it to overcome it.’

‘String bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace.’ This is how Yoko Ono described her infamousFilm No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966–1967)—an 80-minute montage of 365 human bottoms, featuring different genders, races,and body types. Marshaling her conceptual Fluxus rigour and sly humour into a powerful political protest against theVietnam War, Ono’s provocative film retains its antiwar bite as well as its universalising humanism today.

In the diptych that Francesco Clemente created for Rear View, Gold on Green, Green on Gold (2023), the artist slylyquestions the front/back logic that underpins the exhibition as well as the binary thinking that governs so much ofWestern culture. Using gold leaf and a radically reduced palette, Clemente portrays ambiguous, gender-indeterminatefigures that appear to be engaged in oral sex. The artist muses, ‘Maybe our mistaken ideas—based on duality, based on’us against them’—begin with the fact that we can only see half of what there is. We can only face one direction. Wefeel incomplete because we can never see completely ourselves. Painting may repair that, offering a vision of totality.’

Full Frontal, a pendant presentation to Rear View exhibited on the gallery’s second floor, will explore the opposite arthistorical trope—frontal nudity. As the idiom of the title suggests, debates around moral propriety and censorshipin art and popular culture often ascribe a confrontational value to front-facing nudes. While the naked body hasalways been present in visual culture, shifting social values have influenced representational approaches to the subject.Featured in Full Frontal are works by Miriam Cahn, Jenna Gribbon, and Barkley L. Hendricks, among others.

In this context, another thematic trope of Rear View manifests in the work of Edgar Degas. Second only to his imagesof ballet dances, Degas’s voyeuristic bathing scenes dominate his vast oeuvre. On view in the exhibition, the artist’sdelicate 1889–92 pastel Femme se peignant depicts a young nude female, seen from behind, combing her raven-colouredtresses over her head. Degas’s scopophilic gaze focuses on the model’s flowing mane—a visual and psychological effectechoed by Domenico Gnoli’s sumptuous large-scale canvas Curly Red Hair (1969), which lingers over the texture ofauburn curls cascading down a woman’s back. Tightly cropped to the subject at hand and denying the identifying