Andrew Sendor: Paintings, Drawings and a Film is organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and curated by Caitlín Doherty, Curator and Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs. Support for this exhibition is provided by the Elizabeth Halsted fund and the MSU Broad’s general exhibitions fund.
About the Exhibition
Andrew Sendor’s meticulously crafted paintings and drawings are influenced in equal part by the conventions of photography and cinema. Although his hyper-realistic renderings create an appearance of photographic reproductions, they display elements of the theatrical, the mystical, and the absurd. The artist’s attention to detail produces stunning tableaux, yet slight differences in seemingly identical images suggest the advancement of time. In addition, performative postures and staged backdrops render these compositions cinematic. Much like a film, the artist introduces us to a cast of reoccurring characters. Rather than representing archetypes, Sendor has imagined complex histories for his characters, which include the mercurial dendrochronologist Boris Flumzy and the spiritual advisor Miss Ecstasy, aka Seda Mercedes, among others. For his exhibition at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Sendor presents a selection of recent paintings and drawings alongside Fenomeno, a film that chronicles a series of rituals performed by Sendor’s imagined band of mystics. Taken together, his use of fragmentation and repetition draws attention to the constructed artifice of images, and allows him to create complex, nonlinear, and multilayered narratives.
Images
