Abundance/Excess: A Contemporary Eye on Still Life gathered works by 10 contemporary artists who drew on the legacy of still life painting in their practice. Still life has a long reputation as a genre for aesthetic experimentation, and the artists in Abundance/Excess continued this tradition of exploration and play while also incorporating still life’s thematic emphasis on time, impermanence, and the politics of bounty.
The first section of the exhibition, Abundance, featured contemporary artworks that interrogated the forms and distribution of wealth in American history and questioned how we buy and sell in the present. The second section of the exhibition, Excess, considered the environmental and social impacts of overconsumption. Many of the featured artworks incorporated discarded and repurposed materials, including bath towels, trash-picked toys, and collaged grocery flyers. As a whole, the artists in Abundance/Excess used representations of fish, fruit, meat, and flowers to consider larger questions about the effects and consequences of industrial extraction and production.
Artists in the exhibition were Kate Abercrombie, Sungho Bae, Katie Butler, Ilana Harris-Babou, Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, King Cobra, Tamara Kostianovsky, sTo Len, Cara Romero, and Misha Wyllie.
Support for this exhibition is provided by the Every Page Foundation and the Tuttleman Family Foundation.
Aetna Better Health Kids proudly supports exhibition programming.