Bob Trotman: Inverted Utopias will be the inaugural exhibition in a new gallery dedicated to showing work by North Carolina artists that will open at the North Carolina Museum of Art in the fall of 2010.
The opening exhibition in the North Carolina Gallery will feature key works from the past decade by Bob Trotman, open November 7, 2010–March 27, 2011, a significant and widely known North Carolina artist who describes his figurative sculptures as an “off-balance hybrid” of influences that include Norman Rockwell, among other artists. Accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, Inverted Utopias will include loans from the artist, private collections, and museums, along with an existing work in the NCMA’s permanent collection. The Museum has also commissioned a major new work by Trotman for the exhibition that will remain on view as part of the permanent collection.
A native of North Carolina, Bob Trotman began his artistic career as a furniture maker, gradually moving away from crafting functional objects to creating sculpture with a human presence. Inspired by a wide range of sources, including ship figureheads, 19th-century storefront wooden effigies, and Gothic religious sculptures, Trotman’s figurative works evolved out of his earlier anthropomorphic furniture. His painted, stained, and carved wood sculptures often depict anonymous people who appear to be in various states of change or flux, both physically and emotionally. The figures are simultaneously humorous and disquieting. Dressed in suits and ties or ladylike dresses, they are portrayed upside down with their legs waving in the air, poised on the brink of jumping or leaping, or sinking into the floor as if it were made of quicksand.
Trotman’s portraits of “model citizens” are infused with enigmatic narratives that lie beneath their carved surfaces, and their startling poses give a whole new meaning to the term body language. “I’m sure we can all call to mind the idealized, utopian version of American life as offered by Norman Rockwell in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post,” Trotman says. “With my wooden figures, I’m making an inverted version of that picture, a dystopian America, where ambiguity replaces certainty.”
As part of the NCMA’s ongoing commitment to the citizens of our state, the new North Carolina Gallery will exhibit the work of emerging and established North Carolina artists. Solo and thematic exhibitions will rotate twice a year and draw from loans and the Museum’s permanent collection.
Organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. Support is provided by The Windgate Charitable Foundation. This exhibition is also made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.
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