Jackson Hole: Highlights from 1900 to Today

To close out the year and enter the winter season, Heather James Jackson Hole presents highlights at the gallery that span the last 100 years. From sculpture to painting, landscape to Pop Art, this exhibition focuses on important art and artists through a fun survey of art history.

Featured in the exhibition is “Yellow River” by Deborah Butterfield from her acclaimed series of horses. Butterfield originally created the horses from wood and other materials found on her property in Bozeman, Montana and saw the horses as a metaphorical self-portrait, mining the emotional resonance of these forms. As this sculpture shows, she transitioned away from wood to experiment with new materials.

Another standout is “Untitled”, a large metal work by Greek artist Jannis Kounellis. Kounellis was a key figure in the Italian art movement called Arte Povera that incorporated unconventional but everyday objects to disrupt the commercialization of art. The work walks the line between sculpture and painting; the placement of the iron bars suggests planes of color that a more traditional painter would apply to the canvas. Although devoid of figures, this work centers itself around humankind in its material and form.

A perfect illustration of post-modernism, “Girl with Bow Tie” by George Condo is a painting that is at once surface and depth, where art historical references to the cubism of the early 20th brush up against Condo’s search to examine psychological depths. Condo describes his process as an ‘Artificial Realism’ approach to portraiture, which, in an appropriate case of tautology, he defines as the ‘realistic representation of that which is artificial’.

Perfect for the change of seasons, the exhibition showcases Edward Hopper’s “Church and Landscape” which depicts a cold and wintery landscape early in Hopper’s career. Other artists in the exhibition include Mel Ramos, Pablo Picasso, Hassel Smith, Andy Warhol, and Michael Corinne West.