CURRENT EXHIBITION

The Wright Contemporary is delighted to present Isabelle Plat’s debut exhibition in the United States, “Portraits d’usage in Conversation.” The Paris-based artist has been showing in Europe since the 1980s, having developed a vocabulary that wittily recycles garments given to her by friends, hair collected from styling salons and accoutrements like shoes, socks, and belts.

“Portraits d’usage” translates roughly into “usable portraits” and in some contexts the “sculptures” can be worn or sat upon or otherwise occupied (but not at the Wright, where we are little concerned about wear and tear) and they belong in a tradition of works that have practical functions, like the benches of Donald Judd or Scott Burton or the living units of Andrea Zittel. But they are also a kind of innovative portraiture: “I associate the human body with the bubble that everyone creates for themselves in the real world,” the artist has written. “If Cubist painting subjectively deconstructed people and objects and showed us their hidden sides, my installations conjure with the internal life—materials that bear the traces of life: already-worn clothing, agglomerations of human hair, and other traces of the living subject.”