NASHVILLE, TN..- A major symposium for the Paint Made Flesh exhibition, a revisionist study of post-World War II art, has sold out. More than 250 guests from across the country are expected to attend the symposium, that features keynote speaker Dr. John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, and artist Eric Fischl in addition to five noted professors and curators.

The symposium will offer compelling conversation about the role of figure painting as it has defined psychological and socio-historical conditions in Europe and the United States since World War II.

Paint Made Flesh, on view at the Frist Center Jan. 23–May 10, 2009, presents paintings created in Europe and the United States since the 1950s in which a wide range of painterly effects suggest the physical properties and cultural significance of human flesh and skin. The exhibition offers a rejoinder to the modernist orthodoxies of the mid-to-late 20th century, which favored abstraction or conceptual art, by contending that paint’s material properties make it well suited to convey metaphors of human vulnerability through images of the figure. The exhibition includes works by Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, John Currin, Eric Fischl, Lucian Freud, Leon Golub, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Wangechi Mutu, Alice Neel, Pablo Picasso, Daniel Richter, Jenny Saville and others. Organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, the exhibition will travel to the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.) and to the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester (New York).

A complete schedule of the symposium is available on the Frist Center Web site: http://fristcenter.org/site/calendar/eventdetail.aspx?cid=699