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Delicatessen

Schmidt Center Gallery
November 9, 2007 - January 26, 2008

Artists in the Exhibition: Thordis Adalsteinsdottir, Diann Bauer, Jane Benson, Luisa Caldwell, Elaine Chow, William Cordova, Boyce Cummings, Tracy Emin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ellen Harvey, Jim Hodges, Jesper Just, Nina Katchadourian, Roxy Paine, Chloe Piene, Hunter Reynolds, Christina Lei Rodriguez, Jon Rosenbaum, Andrew Scott Ross, Shazia Sikander, Jordan Wolfson, Randy Wray.
Guest Curator: Diana Shpungin.

Delicatessen featured 22 internationally recognized and emerging artists working in diverse media. These artists explore a broad range of artistic approaches and subject matter but all embody an identifiable though elusive sensibility identified here as “Delicatessen.”  The exhibition included artists working with material, subject matter or concepts often construed as traditionally beautiful, campy, kitsch, mundane, saccharine, sentimental, grotesque, or even dark and menacing. The artists played with and transformed these associations through repetitive accumulation, strange juxtapositions and/or inventive assemblage. The artists challenged the original connotations of their chosen material or subject and walk a delicate line that transformed their work into something more potent, more engaging and sometimes even sublimely beautiful. The exhibition recoined the word delicatessen by bringing it back to its Latin roots, Delicatus, meaning  “giving pleasure, delight.”  This more poetic interpretation was pursued in the exhibition in contrast to the more familiar meaning related to food or commerce.  The exhibition challenged the somewhat utilitarian connotation of delicatessen as we know it, by presenting works that, despite their dissimilarities, consistently feature delicate sensibilities. Several artists have visited FAU to install their works, including Thordis Adalsteinsdottir who has created a new temporary work directly on the wall of the Schmidt Center Gallery Public Space.

Images (clockwise from top left): Installation view of the Schmidt Center Gallery with works by Christina lei Rodriguez, Jane Benson, and Boyce Cummings; installation view; installation view of the Schmidt Center Gallery with works by Roxy Paine, Tracy Emin, and Luisa Caldwell; installation detail of work by Andrew Scott Ross.




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