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The Eye of the Artist: The Work of Devorah Sperber
- Dates: January 26, 2007 through June 17, 2007
- Organizing Department:
Prints, Drawings and Photographs
- Collections: Contemporary Art
- Location:
This exhibition is no longer on view
in Mezzanine Gallery, 2nd Floor - Description: The Eye of the Artist: The Work of Devorah Sperber. [01/26/2007 - 05/06/2007]. Installation view.
- Citation: Brooklyn Museum Digital Collections and Services. Records of the Department of Digital Collections and Services. (DIG_E_2007_Sperber)
- Source: born digital
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May 2007: Artist Devorah Sperber will exhibit five of her thread-spool installations and two recent works composed of colored crystals in an exhibition that opens at the Brooklyn Museum January 26, 2007. Included in the presentation, on view through June 17, will be a work comprising 20,000 spools of colored thread arranged in a seemingly abstract pattern, which when viewed through an optical device becomes recognizable as Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
Fascinated by the connections between art, science, and technology, Sperber deconstructs familiar images to address the way the brain processes visual information versus the way we think we see. She begins her making computer-generated pixilated diagrams to which she then substitutes colored spools of thread for the pixels.
The artist hangs the thread-spool works upside down, a reference to the way the human eye inverts images onto the retina. From a few feet away, the compositions appear to be nonrepresentational fields of color. Once seen through a viewing sphere that functions like the lens of the eye, the work becomes a clear reproduction of the famous painting. Included in this exhibition are full-scale re-creations of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, as well as Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein and Van Eyck’s Man in a Red Turban.
In her two crystal works and circular thread-spool works, Sperber addresses the theory that throughout the history of Western portraiture, one eye of the sitter is often located very close to the vertical center of the composition. When working with crystals, Sperber divides the original portrait along the central vertical axis and then mirrors each portion to create two related portraits that are exhibited side-by-side. To see the original portrait emerge, viewers are encouraged to step back and use a piece of paper to block out the two middle sections.
Eye of the Artist: The Work of Devorah Sperber is co-curated by Marilyn Kushner and Nicole Caruth.
Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
