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<\/a>Painter Robert Feintuch and sculptor Rona Pondick pose with some of their work at the Bates College Museum of Art. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n
But only since February 2017 has it been possible to see a substantial selection of both their work combined in one exhibition. And only now has that exhibition come to Bates, where Feintuch is in his 42nd and final year on the art and visual culture faculty.<\/p>\n
Opening with a 6 p.m. gallery talk and reception on Oct. 27 at the Museum of Art, the exhibition Rona Pondick and Robert Feintuch<\/a>: Heads, Hands, Feet; Sleeping, Holding, Dreaming, Dying was organized by museum director Dan Mills and made its debut nine months ago at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cRona<\/a> and Robert<\/a> each use themselves as a model, yet neither makes self-portraits per se,\u201d Mills says. “While their work is materially very different, this approach to making work and the psychological interest in the body and gesture that they have in common fascinated me.<\/p>\n \u201cI started thinking about exhibiting their work for Bates, where Robert has taught for many years but rarely shown and where Rona has never shown. And as I was developing this idea, I realized that no one had ever organized an exhibition investigating” that common interest.<\/p>\n \u201cIt became clear that this is the exhibition we should present at Bates.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhite Beaver\u201d (2009\u201311) by Rona Pondick, painted bronze, edition 2\/3. Courtesy of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London\/Paris\/Salzburg; Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston; Zevitas\/Marcus Gallery, Los Angeles; and the artist.<\/p><\/div>\n Until Mills proposed the idea a few years ago, Feintuch and Pondick hadn\u2019t considered a joint exhibition \u2014 even though each is intimately familiar with the other\u2019s work (they even had adjacent studios for many years).<\/p>\n \u201cA few people who followed our work very closely talked about seeing relationships between the work,\u201d says Feintuch. But, he continues, \u201con a superficial level, we kept seeing the differences.\u201d<\/p>\n Mills was one of the ones who saw the relationships. \u201cThey believe the body speaks,\u201d he says. \u201cThey seek to represent subjective experience and psychological states through a physical vocabulary comprising aspects such as gesture, posture, naturalism, and expressive distortion.”<\/p>\n Pondick\u2019s sculptures combine forms from the human body \u2014 usually her own \u2014 with those from non-human animals. ARTnews<\/em> critic Lilly Wei ascribed “disquieting psychological reverberations” to her sculptures, reverberations that “paradoxically attract and repel.”<\/p>\n Feintuch, meanwhile, situates unheroic older men in dreamlike settings that express vanity and vulnerability, and his work is consistently regarded as comic and rooted in psychological machinations.<\/p>\n \u201cFeet Up\u201d (2013) by Robert Feintuch, polymer emulsion on honeycomb panel. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston; Zevitas\/Marcus Gallery, Los Angeles; and the artist.<\/p><\/div>\n Now residents of New York City, they met at the Yale University School of Art. The Bates exhibition comprises nine sculptures and a series of prints created by Pondick between 1998 and 2013, and 11 paintings that Feintuch made between 2007 and 2016.<\/p>\n Juxtaposing their artworks was something of a revelation to the couple. \u201cOne of the things that we\u2019ve both been really struck by, between installing the show in Utah and then again here, is that it feels like our work goes together in a very interesting way,\u201d says Pondick.<\/p>\n \u201cEven though the work is approached so differently and our sensibilities are so different, we share so many interests that we complement each other in ways that are surprising to us. And that is both shocking and kind of intriguing,\u201d given how long they\u2019ve been together.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re both interested in having people interpret the work,\u201d says Feintuch \u2014 that is, look beyond the physical presence of a given piece. \u201cThat physical presence makes a lot of the meaning, but we also want people to think about what the work is about and what it feels like psychologically.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve had a wide range of interpretations of my work across the years, and none of them seem wrong to me. A lot of visual art is ambiguous in its meanings, and it\u2019s one of the things I love about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Art-historical references lend another dimension of meaning to their work. Pondick’s animal\/human hybrid sculptures have a long lineage across many cultures, and Feintuch’s paintings often play with historical mythological and religious imagery.<\/p>\n Similarly, each combines age-old and cutting-edge technologies. Pondick employs three-dimensional scanning, computer imaging, carving, hand modeling, and traditional metal casting. Feintuch’s preparation for a painting has often mated hand-drawing from life with drawing on the computer and manipulating photographic material.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>