THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER
The World’s Greatest Sinner at the Galbut Institute, featuring 4 historic and monumental works on paper drawn by the artist Anna Vickers over 20 years ago. The exhibition will take place Feb 15 – May 3, 2025 with an opening reception Saturday, Feb 15, 12-4pm.
The Galbut Institute is pleased to present The World’s Greatest Sinner, an exhibition of four monumental works on paper drawn by the artist Anna Vickers over 20 years ago. The World’s Greatest Sinner follows the Galbut Institute’s exhibition Ces Petits Riens which showcased recent small-scale paintings by Vickers. The contrast between time and scale in these consecutive exhibitions invites the viewer to reflect on the expansive range of the artist and her profound interrogation of the female nude subject over the course of a generation.
The gigantic drawings in the show each measure 8’H X 11’L. Composed exclusively of charcoal on paper, Vickers creates a range of tones through the radical technique of intricately ripping the paper’s foregrounded layers. This ripping models larger than life nude figures and gives shape to their surroundings with a myriad of sweeping, crackling, mottling, dappling, spiraling and pouring marks across the drawings’ surfaces. The results are remarkably uncanny.
The exhibition borrows its title from Timothy Carey’s 1962 rock ‘n’ roll film ‘The World’s Greatest Sinner’ in which the protagonist falls under the influence of the devil. Presented as a fully immersive experience on all four walls of the Galbut Institute, the drawings are cinematic in proportion and scale. They allude to a multitude of filmic references ranging from early modernist studies of motion to Chris Marker’s 1962 featurette La Jetée told through black & white still images.
The drawings’ Amazonian figures are grouped into compositions with Hellenistic and Neo-classical allusions like The Three Graces or Ingres’ The Turkish Baths. Some figures appear staged on abstract platforms while others are about to fall off the edge or have already fallen off onto lower planes. The abstract platforms echo the ambiguous stages in Watteau’s Les Plaisirs du Bal and Les Charmes de la Vie, positioning the figures between life and theater.
An underworldly, purgatorial quality is present throughout the works. The huddled, mirrored and rotating figures are playfully imbued with an array of characteristics from the seductive to fetishistic to zombie-like to spooky. Through all these devices, Vickers creates a cast of dislocated and unmoored characters marked by the confluence of youthful innocence and a self-reflexive questioning of their state of being.
The Galbut Institute
Little Haiti Little River Art Days
255 NE 69th St. Unit D Miami, FL 33138
THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER
Feb 15 – May 3, 2025
