Marc Handelman is a man of many talents, drawing in viewers with his unique portrayal of landscape paintings. With experience in visual art, installation, books, film and photography, the artist spoke at the Visiting Artist Lecture Series at Hanes Arts Center on Tuesday.
Handelman said many of his paintings draw on American aesthetics, many of which are rooted in 19th-century American landscape painting. His work explores how forms of rhetoric in landscape and nature appear in today’s art and politics.
“I’ve been thinking about landscape for about 15 years,” Handelman said. “In graduate school, I was making work about how painting can speak to forms of objective violence in things like ideology, racism and imperialism. I was interested in how functions of aesthetic pleasure operate.”
Associate Professor of Art Sabine Gruffat has great respect for Handelman and was excited to have him speak at the center.
“Handelman is a very achieved painter and is very well-respected in the arts,” Gruffat said. “He is so invested in his work, and I think his art has a very different importance to everyone.”
Gruffat said Handelman paints in a unique way — deeply absorbed, slowly and meticulously.
“He is highly conceptual, so he does a lot of research into the idea of civilization and ruins,” Gruffat said. “He is especially interested in landscape painting.”
Gruffat said Handelman’s investment in his work will provide students at the Visiting Artist Lecture Series with the potential of obtaining a new way of thinking or a new way to see the world.
“Art has a different logic than other things,” Gruffat said. “It is a way of thinking that is very outside of pre-established norms.”
