Martin Wong

January 04, 2016, 9:06am

Unveiling the Resonant Context: Art AIDS America at the Tacoma Art Museum

When you are in a gallery with Izhar Patkin’s Unveiling of a Modern Chastity, it is hard to look at the painting, but it’s also hard to look anything else. Its thick, purple wounds bore through the canvas so viscerally, they exhume the pain of a person standing beside you that you want to help, except all you can do is look. This, in some sense, is the point of the 1981 painting—the earliest work in the exhibition Art AIDS America, at the Tacoma Art Museum. Rejecting the idea of pure abstraction, the urgency of life or death circumstances floods through its sickly, yellow surface and raw, fleshy texture, moving us to find a way to respond.— Erin Langner, Seattle contributor

Izhar Patkin | Unveiling of a Modern Chastity, 1981, rubber, latex, and ink on canvas. Courtesy the Artist.