Roamings of a Leo: Hung Liu and more at Palm Springs Art Museum

On Friday February 27th I roamed around the Palm Springs Art Museum and discovered the art of Hung Liu. The 80 painting exhibit is entitled "Summoning Ghosts" and displays haunting art of this artist born in 1948 and raised in revolutionary China. She was trained as a social realist painter and muralist and came to the U.S. in 1984 to attend U.C. Sand Diego where she received her FMA. She then moved to the bay area to become a faculty member at Mills College in 1990.

The exhibit brochure states that Liu uses drips and washes as a corrosive force that obscures her images, suggesting the dissolution of historical memory. "The drips also represent a continuing action that is not yet complete, alluding to how the meaning of history itself is ever changing."

Here is a photo of the exhibit entrance and some photos from the Oakland Museum web site where this exhibit began. The museum does not allow photos of visiting exhibits.

Some of Liu's paintings are based on historical Chinese photographs. With some she adds items like this one with small shelves holding tea cups.

"September 2001" by Hung Liu. The brochure states that the circles in Liu's paintings are forms of visual punctuation - like pauses - that allow the artist's hand to continue painting during moments of rest or uncertainty.

"Annunciation"

"By Rivers of Babylon"

"Chinese Profile III"

"Dangling"

"Daughter of the Revolution," 1993

"Mu Nu (mother and daughter)"

Here are some other favorites I visited while at the Palm Springs Art Museum:

"Man in Space," 1955 by Gino Severini, gouache on board, in six parts.

"Untitled" by Dale Chihuly

"Untitled," 1995 by Dale Chichuly, acrylic on paper

"Grand Canyon (Mist in the Canyon)," 1915 by Thomas Moran, American 1837-1926

"Hunter and Setters in the Foothills with the Great Basin Beyond," 1871 by Thomas Hill, American born England, 1829-1909

"Riding Line," 1892 by Charles Marion Russell, American 1864-1926

"Joaquin Murieta: The Vaquero," 1875 by Charles Christain Nahl, German, 1818-1878

"Kachina Montage," 1997 by Dan Namingha, Hopi-Tewa, born 1950

"Untitled (Horse)," 1978 by Deborah Butterfield, American, born 1949, mud, sticks

"Two Forms and White (Greek)," 1969 by Barbara Hepworth, British, 1903-1975

"The Village," 1952 by Marc Chagall, Russian, 1887-1985, paint on ceramic tiles

"The Last Outpost," 1993 by Llyn Foulkes, American, born 1934

"Screen with Brushstroke," 1986 by Roy Lichtenstein, American 1923-1997, five panel lacquered wood relief with silver leaf.

"Shovel Man," 1974 by James Surls, American born 1943, wood

"Interlocking Forms (blue, lavender, white)" by Karl Stanley Benjamin, American, 1925-2012

"Rat Catcher of Hamelin IV," 2011 by Mark Bradford, American born 1961, mixed media collage on canvas. "This work is the fourth section of a four-panel painting created for the 2011 Istanbul Biennial. It is based on a series of fifty billboards gather from the Leimert Park neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles, where Mark Bradford grew up and maintains his studio.