Porter Contemporary is pleased to announce Body Beautiful, a group exhibition of seven artists that will both confirm and re-examine our ideas of beauty when it comes to the human form. The exhibition opens to the public with a wine reception with the artists on Thursday, January 12, from 6:30 – 8:30 PM.

Porter / Contemporary has selected artists and works that engage our inherent sense of beauty. The graceful and smooth marble sculptures of Carolina Baptista Rodriguez and the intimate photographs of Sarah Kaufman are juxtaposed with Juliet Foxtrot’s modernized Da Vinci type painted nudes, Jennifer Murray’s half human half animal mixed media works and Catherine Tafur’s disturbing and erotic paintings. Body Beautiful inspires a self-exploration of what defines beauty through different forms and mediums.

About the Artists:

David Ajengo is a self-taught artist born in Madrid and working in London. He works at refining his understanding of the visual language of the human body and his need to represent our psychologies, thoughts and emotions onto that which is at once most familiar, but also so easily lost in the complex visual cultures of the modern world.

Born in Chile and currently living and working in London, Pato Bosich is drawn to creating atmospheres and situations that resist easy reading and instead convey a sense of mystery and tension. Often, the imagery comes from second hand visual sources and Bosich explores how experience of such sources can be arrested, slowed down and sensually intensified by expressing them through oil paint.

Juliet Foxtrot is a Sydney based artist whose work captures the dynamic figure derived from contemporary life and imagery in punching, shouting kicks of acrylic and resin on canvas.

Sarah Kaufman, an Assistant Professor of Art in Photography at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, finds her subjects on Craigslist and visits them in their homes. She asks them to try to show her the world that they inhabit when they are alone and the resulting photographs explore the relationships among the subjects, their bodies, and their spaces.

Exploring themes of gender, sexuality, and sociopolitical power struggles, Jennifer Murray uses totemic animal characters to express her impressions of human life within the decaying and carnal confines of New York City. Murray recently completed a Masters in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University, where her concentration was post-colonial studies, gender politics, and metaphorical framing in sociopolitical discourse.

Carolina Rodriguez Baptista (image above) draws inspiration from the complex world of women: makers of life, owners of the secret keys of wisdom and intuition, and driving forces that shape the game of life. Rodriguez Baptista was born in Venezuela, moved to New York City to attend The Parsons School of Design and currently lives in Barcelona, Spain.

Born in Peru, Catherine Tafur moved to New York City to attend the Cooper Union School of Art and now resides in New York. Using images of the body, Tafur explores ideas of gender deconstruction, confrontational sexuality, and the disillusionment and loss of innocence through imagery of disfigurements, idealized androgyny and mutilation.