Talks & Conversations

Artist Talk: Rozeal.

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A woman sitting on a floor with her body angled to our left nearly fills this stylized, vertical painting. Her skin is light tan in some areas, as around her eyes, chest, one hand, and the leg and foot we can see, while what seems like brown paint creeps up her neck to drip upward around her cheeks and onto her forehead. The brown also drips down onto her cleavage, along one arm toward her wrist, and down the shin of her leg. Her right hand, on our left, is entirely brown. She holds her long hair up over her head with her brown hand in front of her face, looking at it with blue eyes and touching it with the other hand. Her hair is blond with dark roots at her scalp, created with long, parallel brushstrokes. Her long nails and curling lips are scarlet red. She wears an emerald-green robe trimmed with white fur and a long strand of pearls that drape over her left arm, closer to us. She sits on a cushion decorated with brown koi fish and stylized blue waves of water, but the exact arrangement of her legs is unclear. A stack of patterned pillows is piled behind her to our left, and comes up to her shoulder. Red circular forms behind her head are painted slate blue with deep brown shadows and red highlights. The words “BACK AND FORTH” are repeated in rows, written in capital yellow letters edged with red, filling the background. Two Japanese characters are painted in red near the lower right corner.
Rozeal. (formerly known as iona rozeal brown), afro.died, T., 2011, acrylic, pen, ink, marker, and graphite on birch plywood panel, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with funds provided by the Women's Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2015.19.243

Celebrate Back and Forth: Rozeal., Titian, Cezanne with exhibition artist Rozeal. and Molly Donovan, the National Gallery’s acting head of modern and contemporary art and curator of contemporary art. Their conversation will explore Rozeal.’s creative practice and revelations from Back and Forth. 

About Back and Forth: Rozeal., Titian, Cezanne

Spanning six centuries and different cultures, four paintings reveal how artists engage with art history—and become part of it.

Art history isn’t linear. Artists mix and remix references, finding inspiration across time.

When contemporary artist Rozeal. began painting afro.died, T. in 2011 in her studio just outside Washington, DC, she didn’t have Titian’s Venus with a Mirror in mind. Paul Cezanne wasn’t thinking about Titian’s Ranuccio Farnese when he painted Boy in a Red Waistcoat in 19th-century France. Yet these works share striking visual similarities with Titian’s 16th-century paintings.

Back and Forth illuminates unexpected connections between these four works and invites us to see them in new ways.  

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