Anglim/Trimble is pleased to present our exhibition The Grand Tour by M. Louise Stanley.
In 1983, M. Louise Stanley received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and spent nine weeks in England, France, Spain, Italy and Greece. While standing in front of Giotto's Death of Saint Francis, Stanley realized that wherever she was, she would always be at home and in good company while engaging with a painting, drawing from a painting or just painting.
Stanley then began an ongoing dialogue with her favorite dead artists, working through sketchbooks and creating studies of their work, which gave her a way to"own" the paintings and savor them back home. For inspiration, Stanley collects ugly babies, bloody feet, gargoyles, and architectural embellishments in her journals and references them as the visual laboratory for her paintings.
The Grand Tour, Stanley's love letter to European art history, includes the mock version of an antique Pompeiian ruin she created after her first trip to Europe, along with her most recent paintings, which continue her tongue-in-cheek analysis of mythology, religion and modernity. After additional trips to Europe through NEA grants and leading her own art lovers tours, Stanley began investigating the transformation myths of Ovid, the cult of Mary and Sainthood, and her favorite old masters.\
In Triumph of Flora, After Tiepolo, a recent investigation of The Empire of Flora by Giovanni Batista Tiepolo, Stanley relocates Flora, the Roman goddess of Spring, to San Francisco. Here under a blue sky, with the colors of the rainbow flag flying, Flora, the classic nude enters the scene, but in Stanley's telling, Flora is a transgender goddess, and her supplicants are a dyke on a bike and a leather daddy. In The Grand Tour, Stanley opens classical spaces to posit contemporary ideas of diversity and inclusion with empathy and humor.
Please join us for a reception on Saturday, January 11 from 4-6 pm in our second-floor gallery at Minnesota Street Project.
The Grand Tour is on view through Saturday, February 22.