Details

Title

The Avoider

Artist/Maker

Michaël Borremans (Belgian, born 1963)

Date

2006

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

141 3/4 x 71 inches

Credit

Purchase with funds from Sara and Paul Steinfeld, Roya and Bahman Irvani, Jack Wieland, and General Acquisitions Fund

Accession #

2007.24

On View

Currently not on view

Since the mid-1990s Belgian artist Michaël Borremans has created a world of intriguing, enigmatic imagery in drawing, painting, and film that is unified in possessing an indefinable sense of time and place. In The Avoider Borremans directly addresses the history of painting. The lone figure embodies dichotomous signals: his manner is at once haughty and humbling-both a Flâneur of city and a shepherd of the country. Borremans's model directly quotes the pose of the figure in Gustav Courbet's great painting The Meeting, but also channels the richness of Édouard Manet's figures and John Singer Sargent's society portraits.

Image Copyright

© Michaël Borremans, courtesy of David Zwirner, New York and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp