The Essential Gesture

Curated by Bruce Guenther, The Essential Gesture, juxtaposes contemporary artist s use of the human body in the post-1945 period with a small selection of early modern masterworks to establish a context for that activity and its interpretation. Focusing on the partial or fragmentary figure, the exhibition acknowledges the dominance of the fragment in the twentieth century and posits it as the form most reflective of the present- incomplete, alternately heroic and frail, ferocious and victimized.
Artists Auguste Rodin, Gaston Lachaise, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Louise Bourgeois, Williem De Kooning, Mark Di Suvero, Markus Lupertz, Georg Baselitz, Oliver Lee Jackson, Magdelena Abakanowicz, Kiki Smith, William Tucker, Bruce Nauman, Manuel Neri, Stephen De Staebler, Joel Shapiro, Lynda Benglis, Antony Gormley, Judith Shea, and Peter Shelton.
Published in 1994 by the Newport Harbor Art Museum which became the Orange County Museum of Art in 1996.