WHERE WE’RE HEADED
134 SPRING 2019EVENTS
Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.
@ Aspen Art Museum, Aspen
Through June 16, 2019 // aspenartmuseum.org
It perhaps seems contrarian to call an artist ahead of her time even as her work harkened back to an era
long before her own. But time is tricky that way; it can mean two things at once. The output of Margaret
Kilgallen was so influential, so connected to American and Western folk art that when we began to see a
mini-renaissance of bohemian culture in the US in the late aughts, you could see the majestic and quiet
spiritual quality of the late artist’s work in the studio practice of so many others. This spring, the Aspen Art
Museum will present, that’s where the beauty is, Margaret Kilgallen’s first posthumous museum exhibition,
and the largest exhibition of her work since In the Sweet Bye & Bye in 2005 at the REDCAT in Los Angeles.
One of California’s most important artists of the last 30 years, Kilgallen’s passing in 2001 at the age of 33
reminds us that she herself was an emerging artist, one who connected to both audiences and history
with mature and intimate depictions of female empowerment and solitary strength. “There is perhaps no
more important time than now to provide a purview of the work of such a strong, empathic young artist;
one who so presciently broke down barriers in representing the world as she saw it,” says Heidi Zuckerman,
Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director of Aspen Art Museum. “In that’s where the beauty is, we have
the pleasure of both sharing a comprehensive view of her timely yet still-emergent practice, as well as
introducing her groundbreaking work to audiences for their reflection not only on all it offers, but also,
poignantly, on its promise. One cannot help but speculate what might have been had Kilgallen been given
more time to explore the paths forecast within the exhibition.” The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully
illustrated catalogue.Monet: The Late Years
@ de Young Museum,
San Francisco
Through May 27, 2019
deyoung.famsf.org
Picture the acclaimed landscape artist,
perched aloft a stilt-legged chair, possessed
by a compulsion to transport his beloved,
gorgeous garden at Giverny onto panoramic
panels that would daze and dazzle with subtle
tonal changes, mouth-watering color and sheer
expanse. “I speak as if I had much ahead...
taking up such an endeavor at my age,” Claude
Monet would remark. At a stage when he had
achieved comfortable success and could literally
rest among the laurels, he took on ambitious
murals, creating an expanding universe of
water lilies. Monet: The Late Years, at the de
Young Museum in San Francisco, conveys the
undeniable appeal of Impressionism, but also
portrays Claude Monet’s enduring passion
as diminished vision actually forces him to
memorize the arrangement of his color palette.
The show surrounds us with agapanthus and
iris, painted in broad, luscious impasto strokes
that portray how space and optics shape our
perceptions. Weeping Willows mourn the horror
of World War I. Monet the young, disruptive
Impressionist, keeps working as he explores
Abstraction. Enter through a Japanese bridge
against the museum’s walls of purples and
greens, where, as described by Marcel Proust,
“The garden itself is a transposition of art... and
comes to life through the eyes of a great painter.”