The Washington Post's art critic Michael O'Sullivan reviews our current show of George Mason University's controversial professor Chawky Frenn's show at Fraser Gallery Bethesda.
O'Sullivan writes:
"Frenn is equally comfortable with ambiguity, a quality that's obvious in three paintings depicting disquietingly androgynous nudes. Yet it is not bare flesh — at least not human flesh — that makes up his most disturbing, and, to my eyes, most satisfying, work. Based on photographs taken in butcher shops during trips to his native Lebanon, Frenn's latest and best paintings depict decapitated sheep's heads and beef cattle at various stages of slaughter.Like all of Frenn's art, they're an attempt to take something ugly and turn it into something beautiful, or, as he says, "to transform manure into new life, [excrement] into fruit." In addition to their shopworn memento mori message, though, that reminds us subconsciously of our own mortality, Frenn pushes other readings of his work. One of his carcasses, after all, is called "Kosher or Halal?" in a reference to the futility of killing in the name of religion (halal refers to Muslim dietary laws)."
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