PALM BEACH––Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present Bathers, a group exhibition exploring the motif of the bather across eighty years of painting, drawing, photography, and collage. On view at the gallery’s Palm Beach location, the selected works expand on the dynamic possibilities of the genre articulated in the paintings of Cecily Brown, for whom the bather is a rich and compelling subject. Artists in the exhibition include: Milton Avery, Jennifer Bartlett, Cecily Brown, Paul Cadmus, Sarah Charlesworth, Robert Colescott, Eric Fischl, David Hockney, Cheyenne Julien, Alex Katz, Sherrie Levine, Christian Marclay, Sigmar Polke, and Bob Thompson.
Both ephemeral and corporeal, Cecily Brown’s impassioned and expressive bather paintings exemplify the pleasurable and celebratory ethos of post-impressionist bodies in nature. The aptly titled Palm Beach Blues (2023), one of two new bather paintings in the exhibition, includes a nude seen from behind in the moment of undressing, a recurrent theme for Brown. Three watercolors by Robert Colescott consider the motif’s potential to anchor the political in the poetic––while discussing his Bather series, Colescott described the works as statements on “competing standards of beauty, and also about the intrusion of the white world on a black world.”[1] Set in a fictional Eden filled with interracial encounters, the mysterious Gift of the Sea (1984), depicts a group of black and brown women surrounding an unconscious white woman who has washed ashore.
Alex Katz and Eric Fischl are drawn to pools, oceans and lakeside views where their subjects relax, undress, and appear at ease. Both artists have captured the informal human sociability that takes place on the beach, where bodies are thrown into relief against sunlit sea and sky. Christy (2015) is one of a number of paintings by Katz of fashion model Christy Turlington. Sporting a modest black bathing suit and posed with her hands behind her head, Christy’s easy confidence mirrors the immediacy of Katz’s conversational painting style. In Eric Fischl’s The Lesson (Mostly Forgotten) (2018) the artist employs dramatic beach lighting to vividly render naked flesh in a rich variety of tones. Often painting from photographs, Fischl’s evocative title works with his arresting intergenerational figures to hint at an enigmatic beach day of distant memory.
The California-born Jennifer Bartlett was a committed bather, and aquatic themes frequently permeate her series-based work. Water at Sunset, Swimmers at Sunrise (1979) is a study in contrasts from the artist’s Swimmer series, in which the human figure is represented by the slim, elongated shape of an ellipse. Five swimmers, rendered in enamel on steel plates, surround a central canvas depicting water at sunset in sensuous ripples of dramatic yellow and black. An abstracted bather in similarly stark opposing tones is the subject of Sarah Charlesworth’s White T-Shirt (1983), excised from a magazine and re-photographed against a black background. Charlesworth exposes the viewer’s desire for the toned torso outlined by clinging wet fabric by isolating the body from its original context.
Despite the titillating voyeurism and joyful naturalism of outdoor bathers, the ubiquity of running water and policing of public space encouraged artists to retreat indoors and embrace bathing as a private ritual, as with Sigmar Polke’s curiously captivating Untitled (Frau in Badewanne) (c. 1963). Pierre Bonnard’s Nude in the Bathtub (1925) is depicted from the perspective of the bather, their legs elongated in a deep porcelain tub in a domestic interior. Challenging ideas of originality and authorship, Sherrie Levine framed and presented multiple postcards depicting Bonnard’s painting, underlining the motif of the bather as popular and picturesque object of contemporary cultural discourse.
[1] Robert Colescott in Lowery Stokes Sims, “Colescott in the 1980s and ‘90s: Stranger in a Strange Land,” in Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott, exh. cat. (Cincinnati: Contemporary Arts Center, 2019), p. 95.
