Dario Robleto featured in group exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Work by Dario Robleto is featured in "Strange Bodies: Figurative Works from the Hirshhorn Collection," on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC through early 2010.

From the Hirshhorn's website:

""Strange Bodies" provides an opportunity to examine the ways in which artists have exaggerated or altered the figure in order to explore cultural and individual conflicts and psychology, as well as formal qualities such as color, shape and texture. The exhibition also traces the evolution of the museum's particular focus on collecting figuration. On view are early to mid-20th century works from the core collection Joseph H. Hirshhorn donated to the museum, including pieces by Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning and others, which reveal the various ways in which these artists dissolved or warped the human figure to heighten its expressive and emotional impact. Hirshhorn also acquired paintings by Balthus and René Magritte, which represent the human subject in a surreal way, locating the body (or its parts) in contexts that are outside of mundane occurrences, and, in part, reflect the traumatic war-torn world in which their art developed.

The museum has continued to collect figurative works by artists who both participate in and challenge the tradition of figuration, such as Matthew Barney, John Currin, Ron Mueck, Dario Robleto and Yinka Shonibare. Diverse contemporary approaches to representing the human form suggest that individual identity, as well as attributes like beauty, heroism and power, is multifaceted. In Currin's painting and Mueck's sculpture, fleshy nudes challenge ideals of beauty, while Barney creates photographs of part-human and part-otherworldy avatars that meld the biological with the mythological. As if to collapse many moments in the evolution of the human race and culture into a single object, Robleto created the piece "She Can't Dream for Us All" (2005-06). He used bone dust, pulped letters written to soldiers during various wars and melted audio recordings of Sylvia Plath reading her poetry to construct a sculpturally encased cast of the archeological specimen known as "Lucy," a distan t ancestor to "Homo sapiens." "


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