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Craig
Krull Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of
self-portraits by Don Bachardy, one of the most celebrated portrait
artists of our time. Recognized for his extraordinarily deft, fluid,
and graphically concise portraits, Bachardy has rendered such figures
as Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, Cecil Beaton, Fred Astaire, John
Huston,
Fritz Lang, Ray Bradbury, Bette Davis, Igor Stravinsky, Natalie Wood,
Joan Didion, Ed Ruscha and Jack Nicholson. His portraits are always
from life, never from photographs.
Born in Los Angeles
in 1934,
Bachardy met his lifetime partner Christopher Isherwood in 1953 and
they remained together until Isherwood’s death in 1986. Their home in
Santa Monica Canyon became a salon for the local art world as well as a
mecca for artists, writers and musicians visiting from abroad. A
documentary on their life, Chris and Don; A Love Story, was
produced in
2008.
The exhibition at
Craig Krull Gallery will present
a selection of
self-portraits created by Bachardy over a 50-year period, from
1959-2009. A passionate observer with an innate need to create,
Bachardy notes that, “my self-portraits are most often done when a
scheduled sitter has cancelled a sitting at the last moment. If I have
a strong urge to work and can find no one ready to sit at short notice,
I sometimes set up a mirror and paint myself.” This is a humble
statement from an artist whose distinction in self-portraiture could be
compared to Rembrandt or Van Gogh. In 2005, Bachardy was given a
retrospective of his work at the Huntington Library, which also owns
the archives of Christopher Isherwood.
As a compliment to
the Bachardy exhibition, we
will present a small
selection
of vintage Polaroid portraits of Marlon Brando, Richard Pryor and
others made by the late Lucy Saroyan, the daughter of author William
Saroyan.
Concurrently, the
gallery will present an
exhibition of photographs of
the Los Angeles River by Mark Swope. The son of noted TIME photographer
John Swope, the younger Swope is a native Angeleno who has developed a
keen sense of place in his photographic work. Swope’s interest in a
paved urban river that has become “unincorporated, dormant and
desolate” reflects an aesthetic and theoretical approach associated
with the New Topographic photographers such as Robert Adams and Lewis
Baltz. Writing about this work for the Natural Resources Defense
Council, Daniel Hinerfeld has observed that the photographs appear to
make “no attempt to glorify the river.... In some of his photographs
the river is barely noticeable amidst the urban tumult. In others, the
river shares the frame equally with the conduits of our industrial age:
freeways, train tracks and high-tension wires.” A portion of the
proceeds from this exhibition will benefit the NRDC.
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