Mystery, opening Saturday, Oct. 6, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will explore how the inscrutable has long played a significant role in art.
"Throughout history and across cultures, many works of art were created for mysterious functions: to house spirits, protect communities, aid prayer or ensure fertility," says Robin Nicholson, VMFA's associate director for exhibitions and one of the exhibition's curators.
"Artists have also employed mystery as a powerful component, to convey meaning through symbols, to trigger emotions, or to pique curiosity," he says. The exhibition will remain on view through Dec. 30 and is free and open to the public.
Masks especially evoke a sense of ritual, power and mystery, says another of the show's curators, Sandy Rusak, who is also VMFA's associate director for education and outreach. "Masks are one of the most widespread art forms in Africa, and Mystery features a 20th-century wood mask with its original fiber coiffeur made by a Dan artist," she says. "This mask would help the village with community problems and guide the council of elders."
In addition to enigmatic masks, Mystery also explores cultural interpretations of the spirit world and the afterlife. Nicholson uses an Egyptian work, False Door Stele from 2500-2350 BCE, as an example. (A stele is an upright stone slab, usually bearing markings.) "The stele is a door that - it was literally believed - led to the world of the dead," he explains.
Like the Egyptian false door stele, The God of the Bay of Roses by the 20th-century Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali serves too as a portal into another world, says independent scholar Sara Desvernine Reed, who is also one of the exhibition's four organizers.
"This 1944 image's enigmatic qualities invite us into a kind of dream world, a place where we literally peer through the hole of the standing nude figure. Through art historical research, we have learned that the pedestal contains a portrait of the artist's wife, Gala, yet many of the symbols in the painting remain unexplained. To me, these two works of art offer us an art-historical treasure hunt that invites viewers to participate in finding the answers to these visual mysteries," she says.
While masks and ancient symbols evoke mystery, the universe also fascinates artists as a great unknown.
Works such as Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins' painting Untitled (Galaxy), 1988-1992, "remind us how a vision of the stars is a mystery shared by many cultures across time," Nicholson says. "The painting captures the universal sense of wonder at our place within the cosmos."
Aiesha Halstead, VMFA's coordinator of exhibitions planning and the fourth organizer of "Mystery," has her own mysterious favorite: a 1995-96 sculpture by German-American artist Kiki Smith titled Ice Man.
Smith's sculpture, which is about 6 1/2 feet tall, was inspired by the discovery in the early 1990s of a 5,300-year-old male body frozen in an Alpine glacier, Halstead explains. "The artist recreates in bronze this character filled with humanity, even warped as it is from thousands of years in shifting ice. Ice Man exudes grace and power in the face of death," she says. "And death is after all the ultimate mystery."
Other works to be featured in the exhibition include a Chinese burial mask dating to the 10th-12th century; a 17th-century textile, the Mandala of Sitatapatra, from Tibet; French artist Pierre-Jacques Volaire's 18th-century painting The Eruption of Vesuvius; Georgia O'Keeffe's 1930 painting White Iris; and Virginia artist Sally Mann's 1998 photograph Untitled #9 from her Deep South series.
"With art from diverse ages that span thousands of years and many cultures - Egypt, Africa, Eastern and Southern Asia, Europe, Russia, Latin America, and the United States - Mystery offers a fascinating exploration of both the familiar and the strange," Nicholson says.
The LOOK HERE series is sponsored by SunTrust, with support from the Commonwealth of Virginia. Additional support has been provided by the Richard S. Reynolds Foundation, the Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Exhibition Endowment, the Faberge Ball Endowment, the Faberge Society, and The Council of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
"SunTrust has long been a community partner in Virginia, and we are pleased to continue our relationship with VMFA to present this series of outstanding exhibitions," says C.T. Hill, chairman, president and CEO of SunTrust Bank, Mid-Atlantic. "We believe that by investing in today's cultural resources, we are investing in the prosperity of tomorrow's communities." -- www.vmfa.state.va.us
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