I don’t usually write about the gallery, but this next show is something that I have been working on for months. Every year we do a recent MFA Annual called Introductions. This year we received over 250 submissions from 68 art schools and we went through every one: read every statement, looked at every image, and every resume.
They were first narrowed down to 150, then 70, then 35 and then a final 12.
Personal remarks: Of the 250, there was alot of work dealing with religion, homosexuality and of course, your fair share of “art school” work about the woman’s body. I also saw alot of “artsy” photography and nudity. Click here for The Chosen
Funny, during the reviewing process, I found a submission that became a favorite of the gallery but no one knew how we got it so I emailed the artist. Turned out, he had left it with us at our booth during last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach. It had found its way back to DC and then traveled from the Director’s desk, to the Gallery Manager’s, past 2 interns’ desks onto mine. Unfortunately we couldn’t include him (since he has a BFA from 2001) but Andres Bedoya’s work (drawings, not photographs) would have definitely been included had his education matched our requirements for this particular show.
Tags: Andres Bedoya, contemporary art, Introductions, Introductions3, Irvine Contemporary, Lauren Gentile, MFA Annual, Specullector, washington DC
