21st Century Sires - Joyce Genari
REVIEW
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by Kevin Nance
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Equine painting tends to fall into two categories. There’s the “classic” sort, with horses rendered with high realism in stately settings that suggest their pedigrees and histories. And there’s everything else, in which horses, their doings and their environments are represented with an anything-goes abandon.
In 21st Century Sires, the new Arts Connect exhibition at Central Bank’s John G. Irvin Gallery, Lexington artist Joyce Genari has her “classic” cake and eats it, too. Most of her legendary stallions here have the anatomical detail and subtly illuminated coats we see in sporting art by the British anti-modernist painter Alfred James Munnings, whose work Genari has clearly studied. But her backgrounds are another story. Often wildly colorful and playfully decorative (some look like old William Morris wallpaper prints), Genari’s backgrounds are variously symbolic, anachronistic or just plain weird, in a good way. In “Not This Time,” a horse seems to have been air-lifted into a |
painting by Salvador Dali, while the sky in “City of Light” might have been envisioned by Vincent van Gogh. “Tacitus” is shown posing in front of a Roman aqueduct — a reference to his success at the Aqueduct Race Track. Some stallions are shown time-traveling back to the beginnings of their original bloodlines. And some of the backgrounds are simply gorgeous landscapes such as the magnificently brooding ones in “High Chaparral” and “Midshipman.”
You get a strong sense, walking through the show, of an artist whose relationship with horses — she is a regular at the Keeneland meets and sales, and a frequent visitor to Central Kentucky’s breeding barns — is intense and highly imaginative. Genari lives and breathes the Kentucky horse industry, and engages with it on a level that most artists reserve for their deepest obsessions. I hope she’ll continue this series, and also that she will expand it a bit in terms of the ways she depicts the horses. Could some of them be shown in their glory days on the track, for example, not just after retiring to the stud farm? Just a thought. |