Spiritualism

Many of the Biggs Museum’s landscape paintings in Gallery Six are influenced by a nineteenth-century spiritual movement called Transcendentalism.  It was believed that this spiritual state transcends the physical world and is only realized through intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.  Idealized nature was believed to be one route to transcendence.  A similar emotional quality is present in many works of the Fusion exhibition.  In Posada’s work, the lines created with the bodies of his moving figures are elongated to raise the form upwards.  Representations of the body are also a vehicle for spirituality in Tio’s paintings of ascension and assurance. Although the body is not present in the art of Garcia and Camero, the human spirit is defined by representing the spaces humans are expected to occupy, the chair and the dress.  Each of these works hints at how the artists connect with divinity while often addressing human interconnectedness.