The Nude Museum

New York-based British artist Ellen Harvey presents The Nudist Museum, with the Bass Museum’s extensive collection of nudes as her muse. The artist replicated every nude in the collection, which includes paintings, drawings and sculptures from the Middle Ages to the present, to reveal a wide variety of different historical paradigms of nudity. Don’t expect exact copies, however. The fifty-four resulting paintings are detailed, cropped and colored in such a way that the eye is drawn only to the human figure, everything but the human body in monochrome.

This remix of the museum’s collection of nudes is a continuation of a recent series of exhibitions in which Harvey redefines different gallery and museum spaces as she challenges the audience’s perception and understanding of the artworks that occupy the spaces. The exhibit is open until November 2, 2010.

This story was originally published October 4, 2010 at 9:10 PM.