Artist conquers challenge of making the grotesque beautiful.
You’d be forgiven for describing David Altmejd’s art as frightening. “The work is full of contrast,” says Josée Bélisle, co-curator of Flux, the retrospective of Altmejd’s work on now at the Musée d’art contemporain Montreal. “You have something that may appear grotesque, and then totally sublime and full of sheer beauty. The things that are subdued are also expressive.”
The MACM’s current Altmejd show is the Montreal-born, New York City-residing artist’s first retrospective in his native language, and was a co-production of the Montreal museum as well as the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (France). Bélisle worked with the French museum to put together the exhibition, which showed there earlier this year, with a truncated version of the retrospective moving to the MUDAM Luxembourg in March. It opened in Montreal on June 20.
Bélisle describes Altmejd’s art as being “about research and expression”— appropriately vague terminology for a body of work that comprises full-room installations and sculptures of human figures in various states of undress, abstraction and decomposition. The work is all as jar- ring as it is engaging — macabre and nightmarish, but no less beautiful for all its contortions.
Perhaps no one work encapsulates Altmejd’s ability to balance the gorgeous with the grotesque better than Sarah, a sculpted bust of the artist’s sister. From behind, it takes the form of a female head with long, black hair; from the front, that face is concave, as if kicked in, with the resulting cavity filled with sharp, glistening crystals.
“For him, it represents nothingness but also the infinity of possibility,” Bélisle says. “It’s true that this bust is disturbing because it’s about nothingness. And it may contain a kind of violence: ‘What happened? Why is there a hole?’ For him, it’s very important, because life is like that. Basically, life is constant contrast.”
This depiction of contrast has earned Altmejd numerous honours and accolades, including an invitation to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2007. He is widely celebrated in the U.S. and overseas — perhaps not moreso than in his native Canada, Bélisle says, but at a level that has allowed him the freedom to create “whatever he wants, at his leisure.”
The Flux and the Puddle, for instance, which is the final work on display at the MACM, is what Bélisle describes as Altmejd’s three-dimensional resume: in Lucite boxes, Altmejd has encased various forms and figures — some human, some part-human, some parts of humans — that are “a representation of everything that is of importance of him.”
Asked whether she’s either keen to not give anything about the exhibition away, or at a loss to put their intimidating physicality into words, Bélisle opts for middle ground. “The works are so powerful,” she says, “They appeal to us on all kinds of levels. It’s a must-see.”