Gernika Revisited

 

Baltimore painter Alison Spain looks back over seventy years to reconsider Picasso's famous painting, Guernica, and the event that inspired its creation, the 1937 bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica (Gernika in Basque) by Nazi German and Italian fascist forces.  Spain began the series with a rudimentary, artist's knowledge of the painting, and little information about the actual place or event itself.  Why, she wondered, do I know so little about this place and what happened there?  What, if anything, might it be able to tell me about today?

 

A tapestry copy of Guernica, commissioned, donated and placed by Nelson Rockefeller as a reminder of the horrors of war, hangs on a wall at the United Nations. Shortly before Colin Powell and John Negroponte appeared at the UN on February 5, 2003 to argue that Iraq posed an imminent threat and make the case for war, a large blue curtain was hung to cover the work so that it would not be visible in the background during the subsequent press conference.

 

Gernika Revisited does not presume to be a reworking or homage to Picasso's illustrious masterpiece, rather, Spain uses the work as a jumping off point for further investigation into places unfamiliar and events forgotten, hidden or unseen.  Continuing her work in large scale, almost mural size oil paintings, her new series explores unremarkable places, any-towns in any-countries, and the remarkable events that have occurred there. Spain's imagery investigates themes of current events, violence, innocence & culpability, patriotism and sense of place.  She also examines Guernica in the context of personal iconography, art history, politics, and the role of the artist as witness and citizen.  Can a painting be anything other than a painting? Should it be?

 

Spain's lush, semi-abstracted landscapes become a meditation on an occurrence and a people that she will most likely never know. With almost larger that life flora & fauna, rhythmic color & pattern, and detailed attention to individual marks, her paintings invite the viewer to step inside a highly personal world birthed by chance readings of side notes in the newspaper.  Spain ultimately narrates a story of a place and an occasion in time, an event obscured and finally filtered through one person's awareness.