Anne Slaughter: Contrasts

Les Yeux du Monde is pleased to present Anne Slaughter: Contrasts from October 10 through November 12, 2020. Although the artist has been developing this body of work since her last show at LYDM in 2014, the work is particularly pertinent at this moment in time, tackling such major issues such as human migration, climate change and what she calls “humans’ inhumanity towards other human beings.”

Slaughter laments, “right now, millions of people suffer from wars, violence, poverty, hunger, displacements, and political policies indifferent to their plight.” The Wanderers, a massive 54 x 104” acrylic on canvas depicts a long winding procession of people, young and old, presented in sparse detail in tonal grays, charcoals and blacks, bringing to mind the momentous migrations that are currently happening all over the world and the inhospitable treatment of these populations. Pope Francis called attention to this “refugee crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Second World War” (in an address to Congress in 2015) and a recent New York Times Magazine focused on the migrations already in progress, not just because of political and economic crises, but because of climate change. Slaughter knows this theme personally as a migrant herself at age seven making it out of Belgium during the Nazi occupation with her mother and brother to walk all night from occupied to unoccupied France and then on a six month arduous journey to join her father in England.  Her experience and empathy find their way into this painting and into another large canvas, The Wall of Broken Dreams,  in which she, with the same limited palette and suppressed detail, zeroes in on figures cloaked and floating in a nondescript cold place, some alone, some huddled together, all suggesting homelessness and hunger.

These figurative works are contrasted with large scale sublime landscapes, Desert Heat and Night. She explains that her goal was to show “the beauty of nature in as simple terms as I could paint it without being abstract.”  These landscapes also contrast with each other—one is of a searing midday light and heat, the other the cool colors of night. Solitude, a sole figure staring out into the empty and infinite sea, and Hope, a white and black figure embracing, round out the main part of her installation, again contrasting and yet uniting figure and landscape, white and black, in hoped for unity and peaceful and positive coexistence. Her elimination of extraneous detail and much worked surfaces that bring to mind ancient frescoes or time worn stone or walls lend greater solemnity and universal timeless expression.

In the back gallery, Slaughter presents another contrasting but related body of work, dealing with variations on the theme of water. She depicts Sunrise, a Storm on the Lake, Currents and more, again extracting the essentials in order to amplify the enduring and sublime.

Anne Slaughter’s art has been exhibited widely and is in major public and private collections in the US and abroad. It is also the subject of numerous reviews and publications, from reviews in the Washington Post to the 2006 book, Anne Slaughter: Forty Years Terra Incognita published on the occasion of her Retrospective at Second Street Gallery and Les Yeux du Monde.