VIVIAN GREVEN: WHEN THE SUN HITS THE MOON
Perrotin announces When the Sun Hits the Moon, Vivian Greven's inaugural solo exhibition. This body of work captures intimate moments of yearning, pairing Greco-Roman figures with celestial atmospheres.
April 13 – May 23, 2024
For Vivian Greven, painting is a means to explore what it is to be a human, and how we form intimate relationships with other humans, their bodies and minds. Her approach is to translate representations of physical forms—whether neoclassical sculpture, images found on the internet, or sometimes her own photos—into large-scale paintings in vivid oils and acrylics.
When a composition snags her attention, Greven returns to it over and over again, often working in titled and numbered series. But, while her forms are hyper-realistic, skillfully outlined and shaded to seem almost three-dimensional at times, the paintings are not direct replicas of their sources (or each other). Instead, Greven makes creative adaptations, especially to the colors and the compositions, that render each picture unique and replete with meaning.
The paintings in When the Sun Hits the Moon explore this idea through both subject matter and physicality. Wh Ole I and II (2024), Ae Tha (2024), and Lamia VI (2024) derive from Amor and Psyche, a famous 18th-century sculpture by the Italian neoclassicist Antonio Canova based on an ancient Roman story by Apuleius. The sculpture illustrates the moment in the mythological tale just before Cupid revives Psyche, his mortal lover who has fallen into a lifeless sleep, with a kiss.
While bodies, either coming together or turning away, are at the center of all these works, there is no fleshy naturalism here. What draws Greven to neoclassical sculpture is the romanticized idealism of its smooth and unblemished figures. This is no different to how bodies are depicted in contemporary digital media—airbrushed to perfection.
Idealization may already be a kind of abstraction, and yet Greven’s figures often seem on the brink of dissolving into visual abstraction, their outlines becoming containers for luminous fields of color or other images. In this new body of work, the palette is drawn from the sun and moon, as gestured toward in the title of the exhibition.
For Greven, a painting is itself a kind of body, and the surface of the canvas is the skin: the visible, tactile membrane between the body and the rest of the world. As viewers, everything that we can know about a painting comes from what we see and sense on that surface: the colors, the textures, the images. It’s where we can choose to connect—and so breathe life into otherwise inanimate forms.