Fabulism: Carroll Dunham, Ellen Gallagher, Chris Ofili, Neo Rauch, Matthew Ritchie by Klaus Kertess. Illustrated, 96 pages, hardcover. Joslyn Art Museum, 2004.
In 2003, Joslyn Art Museum engaged the services and expertise of art curator and critis Klauss Kertess to advance the Museum's reinvigorated contemporary art program. Fabulism, Kertess' first group show created for this endeavor brings together five international painters. These artists share a propensity to explore, within the exigencies of their own individual style and time, highly imaginative paths in the direction of fantasy, mythology, and allergory, drawing upon the traditions of the romantics and symbolists of the nineteenth century, the surrealists of the early twentieth century, and the heroic pictorial statements of the abstract expressionists at mid twentieth century. In this exhibition, Kertess has presented us with some fascinating stepping stones which link the recent past to the present, bringing us along for the discovery, encouraging us to partake of the evocations of five remarkable artists who, while vastly different painters, share the gift of myth-making.
