knechtel_6_5_2013

On Wednesday, June 5, Los Angeles-based artist Tom Knechtel presented a lecture in the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University. Knechtel's painting, "Lessons in the Theatre: Ejaculation", is one of twenty eight contemporary works of art that is part of the exhibition "Aberrance and Artifice: The Norton Collection", a group of paintings, sculpture, drawings and photographs donated to the Haggerty Museum in 2000 by Eileen and Peter Norton.

Knechtel's paintings juxtapose beautifully rendered, naturalistic imagery of humans and animals with elaborately detailed ornamentation and abstract elements. These carefully orchestrated spectacles are rife with meaning, and Knechtel's wide ranging interests in various genres of theater, from puppet to kabuki, and literature, from poetry to folklore, inform his aesthetic choices. The ironic and open ended narratives that unfold in his paintings can be considered embodiments of Knechtel's imagination and personal experience, in which fantasy and reality are compressed and complex issues of identity, artifice, sexuality, morality, and memory are explored.

Видео knechtel_6_5_2013 канала Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University