Anne-Karin Furunes, Portrait #18
The Art Museum is pleased to announce the acquisition of Anne-Karin Furunes' Portrait #18, an 88 x 63 inch perforated canvas created in 2007 and on view in the museum for Furune's solo exhibition, Portraits of Unknowns.
Furunes creates images by perforating black of white painted canvases with thousands of various sized holes. Reminiscent of the dot pattern of half-tone photographic prints, her images reference the photographic persona of her subjects. Her work explores the medium of photography and the implications of capturing realistic imagery. View up close, the canvases are abstract fields of dots on a background. From a distance, the portrait emerges.
The subjects for Furunes' portraits are drawn from photographs in a Swedish archive devoted to the now-discredited notion of categorizing people by race, ethnicity, and mental capacity. Her anonymous portraits from the archive restore respect and human dignity to her subjects.
Furunes studied at the National Academy of Fine Art, Oslo and is a professor and dean of the Trondheim At Academy, Norway. She is extensively known in Europe and Australia. Her US introduction was through the Barry Friedman Ltd. exhibition in 2007. She is represented in such public collections as the National Museum of China, Beijing; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; the Tromsp Museum of Contemporary Art, Norway; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasama, Finland; and the Museum of Art, Trondheim, Norway. She is represented in the US by Barry Friedman Ltd., New York.
The purchase of Portrait #18 was made possible by funds from the UW Art Museum Collections Fund, the W. Sherman and Dorothy Burns Estate Fund, and by the National Advisory Board of the UW Art Museum in honor of Rosemary Skinner.
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