Eleanor Antin : HELEN’S ODYSSEY

Helen of Troy was the most beautiful and dangerous woman in the history of western culture. Her story comes down to us from European literature’s founding epic…. But what do we know of her? After three thousand years of notoriety she remains strangely silent as the most beautiful and disastrous objectification of male anxiety and desire. Eleanor Antin, San Diego, August 2007

As a pioneering conceptual artist, Eleanor Antin has engaged in a dialogue with history for nearly forty years. Ronald Feldman Fine Arts is pleased to exhibit Antin’s latest work, in which she turns her gaze on the Trojan War. Through Helen’s Odyssey, Helen of Troy is finally allowed to speak for herself in a series of imagined scenes from the life of the two Helens. For in her pursuit of the Spartan queen, Antin has discovered two women, a charming blonde engaging the seductive pleasures of luxury and desire, and a demonic dark Helen smoldering with disgust and venting her rage on her admiring victimizers. In these nine large-scale dramatic photographs, warriors, artists, gods, and goddesses emerge in a set of luminous archaeological retrievals from Helen’s historically fragmented life.

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts will also feature Eleanor Antin’s work in a solo exhibition in Booth 557 at the 2008 Armory Show in New York, March 27–30. Her work is included in the exhibition, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, February 17–May 12, 2008; and a new retrospective featuring her most recent works, Eleanor Antin: Historical Takes, is scheduled later this year at the San Diego Museum of Art, July 19–November 2, 2008. Eleanor Antin is represented in several major public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Verbund Collection in Vienna, and Museion, Museum of Contemporary Art in Bolzano, Italy.

Opening Reception: Friday, February 15, 6 – 8pm.

Eleanor Antin
HELEN’S ODYSSEY