Living Histories

Previously On View: Doron Langberg

September 30, 2021, through January 23, 2022

 

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Lover, 2021
Oil on linen
30 x 24 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro
Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.
 

Langberg’s paintings celebrate the physicality of touch—in subject matter and process. His intimate yet expansive take on relationships, sexuality, nature, family, and the self proposes how painting can both portray and create queer subjectivity. Lover captures a domestic moment: the subject at home and undressed, nestled in a sofa reading a paper.

Like Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More, Lover is based on direct observation and a close study of the sitter. The artists share a desire for their paintings to feel as alive as their subjects—as Holbein himself stated—and both use surface treatment and paint handling to animate their respective figures, albeit in much different ways. With expressive gestures, abstracted depictions, and broad swaths of intense color, Langberg combines the evidence of his painting process with naturalistic portrayals of the human form, carefully noting its contours, textures, and details like body hair and the fall of light on flesh. Where, for Holbein, the illusion of tactility—a stubbled chin, a velvet sleeve—conveys his own mastery as a painter and the material wealth and power of his sitters, for Langberg, physical and illusory tactility eroticize his subject and his viewers’ acts of looking. By engaging the viewer in this desirous relationship with the paint and subject, Langberg brings us into his queer world.

Lover temporarily takes the place of Holbein’s Thomas Cromwell, which is currently on loan to the exhibition Holbein: Capturing Character in the Renaissance at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (October 19, 2021–January 9, 2022).

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Transcript

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[Aimee Ng, Curator]

Doron Langberg’s Lover engages with the 16th-century portrait by Holbein displayed nearby. Here’s the artist discussing how Holbein’s art inspires him and the themes he explores in his portrait.

[Doron Langberg, Artist]

Seeing a Holbein painting in person is an overwhelming experience.

The level of specificity and clarity is mind blowing.

In the portrait of Thomas More, the shimmery folds of velvet, the soft fur, and the stubble on his chin are so vivid he feels totally alive.

On first encounter I couldn’t really wrap my head around the paintings, and it was actually Holbein’s drawings that gave me access to his work.

More pared down but no less refined than the paintings, each element in the drawing—hair, garments, features—is handled differently, varying in material and even color.

It’s almost a collage sensibility.

This range of visual languages resonated with my own fascination with painting’s power to communicate the sensation of touch, both describing what a material might feel like through illusionistic rendering, and the literal touching of the surface during the painting process.

For me, there’s a clear relationship between this tactility and desire, where the painting and the act of looking itself takes on a sensual or erotic quality.

Being queer, the nature of this desire is not neutral and is sometimes seen as different or even less than.

Through all my work I try to challenge that idea, and in this piece—depicting an intimate domestic moment—I wanted to bring the viewer in through my use of paint and color and share with them a fundamental part of my experience of the world.

[Aimee Ng, Curator]

This installation is part of the series Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters, and will be on view until January 2022.

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About the Artist

photo of Doron Langberg

Doron Langberg (b. Yokneam Moshava, Israel, 1985) lives and works in New York City. He received his M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art, holds a B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), and attended the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk. Langberg has attended the EFA Studio Program, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Yaddo artist residency, and the Queer Art Mentorship Program. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s John Koch Award in Art, an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, and the Yale Schoelkopf Travel Prize. Langberg’s first solo exhibition in London, Give Me Love, is at Victoria Miro until November 6, 2021. Langberg’s work will be included in a major group exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston in 2022. Previously, his work has been shown at institutional venues including the LSU Museum of Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the PAFA Museum. His work is in the collections of the ICA Miami, PAFA Museum, and RISD Museum. This summer Langberg’s work was featured in the show Intimacy: New Queer Art from Berlin and Beyond at the Schwules Museum, Berlin.

Photo: Rafael Martinez

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