Lordan Bunch

Available Works

For the source material for his new series of paintings, Lordan Bunch searched throughout California and Florida for the porcelain memorial photographs found on grave monuments. Bunch was attracted to the formality, beauty, and awkwardness of these pictures representing entire lives. The resulting paintings, gorgeously rendered, are accurate in scale and color to their source yet take on other meanings when recontextualized. For the most part, the source photographs were taken when the subjects (mostly women) were young; their smiles, stylish haircuts and fashions further removed from the death they ultimately memorialize. The original purpose was for the family to immortalize the image of a loved one; still, in a cemetery full of markers these portraits become anonymous faces in the crowd. Bunch’s intent is to bring a focus to the individual, to allow the viewer of his paintings to have a moment of intimacy with each one and imagine a life or story that might have been (and, perhaps, was cut short).

• Recent Exhibitions: Markers, February 2007; Persona (Group Show), March 2006; C.I. 1929, June 2004