The End of Abundance

Combining vivid colouration with an air of wistful contemplation, The End of Abundance is an absorbing example of Brooklyn-based artist Karen Heagle’s sensitive practice. Named for an article Heagle glimpsed in the Financial Times during the 2008 economic crisis, it presents a heap of multifarious objects, which have been arranged as if left for scrap. Tools of the artist’s work — paintbrushes, tubes of acrylic paint — mingle with more ambiguous debris, such as wooden logs and watermelon slices. Two vultures, a reoccurring motif in Heagle’s oeuvre, stand atop this mound. These serve as surrogates for the artist herself, examining and digesting detritus just as she conjures artworks from her own discarded remnants. Heagle’s composition revivifies the form of the seventeenth-century still life, a genre that signifies both the splendours and the transience of material belongings, while her choice of paper as a medium calls further attention to the fragility of earthly things. The End of Abundance was featured in the Saatchi Gallery’s 2011 exhibition Paper. Examples of Heagle’s work are held in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.