Margaret Krug
Statement
Allegory of the Night, Venus at the Forge of Vulcan, and Funerary Fragment from the Cortile, American Academy in Rome are a part of my project that focuses on the Pietà, bare breast, shroud, and sky that culminated in a Fall 2019 residency at the American Academy in Rome.
The impulse for my project, Each Age a Lens, began with a drawing from a film still, from Ingmar Bergman’s, Cries and Whispers, with a focus on the Pietà, the bare breast and the embrace. That drawing, Each Age a Lens (Emily Dickinson), brought to mind my continuing interest in the “woman with the bare breast,” depicted in religious, allegorical and secular paintings and sculpture, and other interests, the “embrace” and the “shroud” in art. The confluence of the religious and the sensual, with regard to the bare breast, the shroud, that covers and reveals, and the embrace, is embodied in Each Age a Lens.
In Rome creating small sketches of passages from works of art on location began with my study of a detail from Michele di Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, Allegory of the Night, Galleria Colonna. One of my sketches, Funerary Fragment from the Cortile, was a result of my fascination with the funerary fragments of the female in the Cortile at the Academy.
GourdGlass/Balaustra/Appliqué and Gourd and Glass are part of my Collections series. I draw the everyday items that maintain a presence from my personal history, a deep investigation of the nostalgic. This helps me to keep a practice of close looking and drawing daily that pulls me into the memory and presence of those I love.
Ovid’s Orchard is a work from an ongoing series that began with the scent in an apple orchard that brought me back to my earliest childhood experiences of the orchard at my family home.
Field is from my nostalgia series, Water and Time, exploring the places I inhabit.
Bio
Margaret Krug MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is an artist, author, associate professor, School of Art, Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design, former senior lecturer at The Whitney Museum of American Art, and Artist Mentor at Lesley College of Art and Design, MFA in Visual Arts Program. She was a 2019 Artist/Scholar resident at the American Academy in Rome. Krug has exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Painting Center, The National Arts Club, The Nelson-Atkins Museum, The Willa Cather Foundation and elsewhere throughout the United States and internationally. She is the author of An Artist’s Handbook: Materials and Techniques, published by Harry N. Abrams, New York, Laurence King, London, distributed worldwide by Thames and Hudson in addition to Spanish, Chinese, German and Russian editions. She is director of a painting, drawing and art history program at the Spannocchia Foundation in Italy. Krug is at work on a forthcoming book on abstraction.