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Untitled (Still Life) 

Sally Mann's Untitled (Still Life) is from Mann's eight book, The Flesh and The Spirit, published in 2010, was released in conjunction with a comprehensive show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia.[17] Though not a retrospective, this 200 page book includes new and recent work (unpublished self-portraits, landscapes, images of her husband, her children's faces, and of the dead at a forensic institute) as well as early works (unpublished color photographs of her children in the 1990s, color Polaroids and platinum prints from the 1970s). Its unifying theme is the body, with its vagaries of illnesses and death, and includes essays by John Ravenal, David Levi Strauss and Anne Wilkes Tucker.

Trace of a Fictional Third

Diana Al-Hadid, 21st-Century Gallery

Al-Hadid makes complex sculptures that seem in a state of flux, suggesting both incompletion and decay. Underlying her large-scale, baroque forms are a wide array of influences, including ancient Biblical and mythological narratives, Arab oral traditions, Gothic church construction, Western painting, Islamic ornamentation, and scientific advances in physics and astronomy. The exhibition features a single new monumental sculpture—Trace of a Fictional Third—that interweaves landscape, architecture, and the human figure. It is accompanied by a selection of new, heavily worked graphite drawings that shed light on Al-Hadid’s creative process. Al-Hadid received her MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and currently lives and works in New York.

The Astronomer (Burning Planet Series) 

 Robert Morris, (Burning Planet Series), painted cast hydrocal, oil on canvas, steel, 1984

 Painting—criticized since the early 20th century as a limited and backward practice—was declared fully dead by the 1960s when Minimalist and Conceptual artists championed sculpture and other less-conventional media as preferred forms of expression. But in the late 1970s and 1980s, a new generation returned to painting with a vengeance, restoring much of what had been jettisoned in previous efforts to shore up its status. Forming a vigorous but unfixed Postmodernists wave, these young artists reintroduced narrative, metaphor, allegory, symbolism, history, and myth into their work--often using the figure and expressionistic brushwork as vehicles. They arrived under monikers such as Neo-Expressionism, Trans-Avant-Garde, New Image, and Pictures Generation. Sometimes socially and politically conscious, at other times introspective and psychological, they embraced pluralism rather than progress and purity. Their work tended to be large, immediate, and committed to subject matter shot through with ambivalence.

Cut Ground Red Blue, 

Sean Scully (American, born Ireland, 1945), oil on linen, 110 x 161¼ in. Sean Scully, born in Ireland in 1945 is a longtime resident of the United States and are among today’s most accomplished painters.Scully’s Cut Ground Red Blue builds on his interest in architecture. Scully was first inspired to paint geometric units of color during a 1972 trip to Morocco, where the stripes and bands of carpets and tents left a strong impression on him. After visiting Mexico in the early 1980s, he transformed his stripes into bricks of color. Over time, his stroke has softened, revealing underlayers of paint and infusing his minimalist, abstract images with a humanistic touch that expresses a wide range of emotions and ideas.