Luhring Augustine is pleased to participate in The Art Show organized by the Art Dealers Association of America with an exhibition of works by Janine Antoni. The exhibition will feature six works made between 1993 and 2003.

In Lick and Lather Antoni references the classical sculptural portrait in soap and chocolate. She began with a pair of busts, one of each material cast from her body which she then reshaped by licking the chocolate and washing with the soap. Using these gentle processes, she obliterates her features in an effort to discuss how our form is an inadequate representation of who we are.

Unveiling is a bronze bell in the form of a veiled figure. Antoni began making the sculpture with the bust used in Lick and Lather yet chose a different method to obscure her physical features. Performing an elementary sculptural exercise, she sculpted a veil of clay over the figure and then cast the clay form in bronze. Her image is hidden by the veil, yet the veil transformed into a bell, calls out. As the bell's clapper is made of lead, a very malleable metal, it becomes sculpted when the bell is rung. The artist's body shaped the veil and the veil now shapes the clapper, whose form is perpetual change. In these two examples of Antoni's self-portraiture, the artist is simultaneously hiding and revealing.

In her photograph Momme, Antoni creates a familiar art historical image of a woman in a domestic setting. It is only on closer inspection that the viewer notices that there are three feet emerging from underneath the woman's dress, instead of two. At that point one can discern Antoni hiding under her mother's dress, metaphorically shrouded in her mother's identity.

If I Die Before I Wake again fuses Janine and her mother, this time sculpturally and meeting on an equal level as mother's hand meets daughter's hand in prayer. The two hands have an uncanny similarity except for evidence of the aging process in one. The illuminated night-light becomes a meditation on our mortality.

Umbilical in its title and form continues Antoni's interest in the mother/daughter relationship. This sculpture is a cast of the negative space in the artist's mouth; it is connected by a replica of a silver spoon, to the negative impression of her mother's hand. Antoni uses an object that define us culturally to make the connection between mother and the daughter. Similar to the gestures of obscuring her image in Lick and Lather and Unveiling, in this instance she describes the figures and their connection in their absence.

Caryatid is the most recent work in this exhibition. When the viewer first encounters this image he/she might assume the figure is balancing upside-down on the vessel. Soon one realizes the photograph has been inverted. In this image, the woman's body is a pedestal for the vessel, just as in classical architecture where the female figure appears as a column holding up ancient buildings. With Caryatid Antoni also plays with the stereotypical association of the woman's body as vessel, the artist has broken the vessel but preserves its function as a container. For Antoni maturity is epitomized in the vessel holding its broken self. Like the busts of Lick and Lather or the veiled woman in Unveiling, the Caryatid plays with classical troupes and historical reference.

For more information please contact the gallery at 212.206.9100.