Rona Pondick and Robert Feintuch

A couple since the mid-1970s, when they met in school, sculptor Rona Pondick and painter Robert Feintuch share interests in making work that uses the body to pursue psychologically suggestive meanings. Each uses their self, though neither makes traditional self-portraits. This remarkable exhibition, the first to present a substantial body of each of their work together, includes nine sculptures and a series of prints by Pondick and twelve paintings by Feintuch. After premiering at Bates, the exhibition will travel to several U.S. museums.

Both believe that the body speaks. Their work embraces gesture, posture, naturalism, and expressive distortion as “elements in a visual language for subjective experience.” In their search for psychological meaning the artists found that a broad history of art became useful and that historical references could speak to contemporary experience. Pondick’s animal/human hybrid sculptures have a long lineage across many cultures, and many of Feintuch’s paintings play with historical mythological and religious imagery.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a profusely illustrated 96 page catalogue with an essay by Terry R. Myers and interview with the artists and Phong Bui.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether or not you go, you may be interested in Rona Pondick: The Metamorphosis of an Object. This volume considers Pondick's hybrid sculptures in detail, illuminating their historical relation to art's originating impulses and offering an alternative model for understanding sculpture.