OPTIONS 2005 Biennial

The WPA\C has announced that Philip Barlow has been named curator for the spring OPTIONS 2005 Biennial. The curator is already busy scouring the region for emerging artists.

Since 1981, the OPTIONS exhibition has featured some of the region's brightest and most talented emerging artists. OPTIONS 2005 will be the eleventh inception of this critically acclaimed biennial exhibit.

This year's curator is a local collector of contemporary art focusing on artists in the Washington, DC area. Philip serves on the Board of Directors of the District of Columbia Arts Center and is the chair of DCAC's Visual Arts Committee. He has served on the Steering Committee for the last two Art-O-Matics. He has also been featured in an article on young collectors in the Washington Post Magazine.

If you would like to send the curator a link to your website or jpeg images of your work for consideration, email him here.

Jeffry Cudlin has an excellent review in the current issue of the WCP about the Georges Rouault exhibition at the Phillips Collection.

Cudlin manages to make Rouault sound semi-interesting. I must admit that Rouault has never been a favorite of mine; in fact he's one of those boring painters whose abuse of the subject matter may have been his only redeeming virtue.

Cudlin elegantly writes:

"Brilliant color and implacable, literal ugliness here make a jarring combination, and the result is a painting that manages to be both overworked and underrealized. Yes, the title indicates that this image is meant to be iconic, but the piece sits uncomfortably between worlds, smacking of urgent sensation while clearly meant to indicate no mere physical encounter."