Photo #4
Datebook
Sunday, January 5
While some artists spend years mastering their techniques with oils or
acrylics, Myan Ludwig, a painter of realistic life portraits, has spent
the last 10 years working on her breakthrough taste paintings. A typical
painting is nothing short of colossal in size, and her controversial
"The New Last Supper" is no exception. Not only does she bring an
irreverent heuristic sensibility to her subjects, she tackles sacred
images with the iconoclasm of the post post-modern Occupy era.
In The New Last Supper, Myan has chosen to focus not on the faces of the
apostles, but rather on the meal. Whereas the original painting shows a
meal of bread, Myan's revisioning is a grotesque scene of gluttony,
American-style. Turkeys (just slaughtered, in a state of defeathering,
stuffed and trussed but not baked, roasted crisp and brown and sliced on
an overflowing plate) are depicted next to boxes of Hostess snack
cakes, McDonald's meals and burritos. The apostles themselves are,
perhaps too literally, corporate CEOs, Ben Bernanke and the Saudi royal
family.
But what makes Myan's work so extraordinary is not her controversial
pop-media subjects, but her use of edible paints. Attend any of her
openings, and with the right ticket, you will be assigned a 2"x2" square
for tasting. Lest you worry about germs, all paintings are correlated
to an electronically-controlled grid. Once a square has been licked by a
patron, the pinpoint light goes dark and that square is no longer
available.
So suddenly, wildly full of sensory possibilities. Love it.
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