Chie Fueki, “Mountain Altar,” 2023, acrylic and colored pencil on mulberry paper on wood, 30” x 36”
November 13, 2023
Geoff Wichert
For centuries, Western artists labored to understand and reproduce the appearance of the natural world. Art created in the 19th-century academies of Europe testifies to their eventual success, so that by 1905, Picasso could move on, reminding writer and collector Gertrude Stein that, according to previous standards, the portrait of her he was painting would not look very much like her. The implication of his warning was that he, and art, had moved on: that there were now other, more important things that art could attempt than to copy what the evolved but untrained eye could see.
Stein’s image then set in motion a reappraisal of the portrait as genre that culminated during the interpersonal isolation brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular in half-a-dozen portraits by Chie Fueki. Born in Yokohama, Japan, and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Fueki has adopted an appropriately multi-cultural approach to art-making that over time has won her both Joan Mitchell and Guggenheim Fellowships. Her exhibition at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art comes in response to her winning the 2023 Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting. The exhibition also includes a recent work, “Mountain Altar,” part of a series developed in her studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. Just as she reimagined the portrait, here she reconsiders the influential American landscape that began in, and has since been associated with, the Hudson River Valley.
