File:Nancy Macko Odalisque 2020.jpg

Photograph by Nancy Macko, Odalisque (archival digital print, 42" x 65", 2020). The image illustrates a key late body of work by Nancy Macko in the 2020s when she produced a photographic body of work depicting organic food waste from her garden compost pile in various states of transformation, as in this image of a cabbage leaf. These works, comprising her "Decompositions" series, occupied an indeterminate space between abstraction and recognizability and served as metaphors for the cycles of life in natures and humans. Critics connected them in visual terms to a wide range of art-historical figures and motifs, including Dutch vanitas painters, Guiseppe Archimboldo, Hieronymus Bosch and Jackson Pollock. This body of work and individual piece were publicly exhibited in prominent exhibitions and discussed by critics in major art journals and daily press publications.

Artist Nancy Macko. Copyright held by the artist.

Nancy Macko

Entire artwork

Yes

The image serves an informational and educational purpose as the primary means of illustrating a key later body of work by Nancy Macko in the 2020s: her "Decompositions" photographic series, which depicted forms from the contents of her garden compost pile that hovered between abstract, amorphous forms and recognizable organic scraps. The series synthesized long-running themes in her work involving change and transformation, natural life cycles, metaphor and reality. Critics described them as arresting images of indeterminacy, capable of evoking a wide range of forms: mysterious landscapes, human bodies, sea creatures, folds of fabric and diverse art-historical referents from painting. Because the article is about an artist and her work, the omission of the image would significantly limit a reader's understanding and ability to understand this key, later body of work, which brought Macko continuing recognition through exhibitions and coverage by major critics and publications. Macko's work of this type and this series is discussed in the article and by critics cited in the article.

There is no free equivalent of this or any other of this series by Nancy Macko, so the image cannot be replaced by a free image.

The image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute the original due to its low resolution and the general workings of the art market, which values the actual work of art. Because of the low resolution, illegal copies could not be made.