reviews

  • Janet Werner, Untitled (Curtain), 2016, oil on canvas, 74 × 60 1⁄4".

    Janet Werner, Untitled (Curtain), 2016, oil on canvas, 74 × 60 1⁄4".

    Janet Werner

    Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal

    Through painterly and conceptual ingenuity, Janet Werner has created a visual language to explore the multiplicity of the self. Her portraits revel in their provenance, explicitly referencing both fashion magazines and a range of precursors, including Francisco Goya, Édouard Manet, Alice Neel, Francis Picabia, and the sculptor Allen Jones. Werner, who attended the MFA program at Yale in the late 1980s with John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, is a far more expressive painter than either, although she, too, strains the female figure through the sieve of popular culture, yielding a burlesque of

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