Existing comment:
Plowboy
This painting, Hung Liu's most recent portrait in the exhibition, is based on a photograph by Dorothea Lange but takes its palette and title from a poem by Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). The 1916 poem "Plowboy," begins:
After the last red sunset glimmer,
Black on the line of a low hill rise,
Formed into moving shadows, I saw
A plowboy and two horses lined against the gray,
The concluding lines, which focus on memory, have special meaning for Liu, who often refers to her paintings as "memorial sites."
I shall remember you long,
Plowboy and horses against the sky in shadow.
I shall remember you and the picture
You made for me,
Turning the turf in the dusk
And haze of an April gloaming.
Liu, like Sandburg, uses imagery to give voice to the forgotten. For her, though, it is "in the process of painting, [where] the invisible becomes visible, and the anonymous becomes familiar."
Oil on canvas, 2020
Collection of Dr. Matthias Bolten and Mr. Matthias Brücklmeier; courtesy of Nancy Hoffman Galler |