Stones and Stoics: Theresa Abel and Kelli Hoppmann

Stones and Stoics: Theresa Abel and Kelli Hoppmann
Madison based painters, Theresa Abel and Kelli Hoppmann, have a decades-long friendship and creative partnership. Hoppmann creates allegorical tableaus of the human condition, often verging on surreal, which blend human with animal and character with costume, complicating notions of identity in highly narrative works. Abel draws her visual vocabulary from medieval religious iconography to examine both the fiction and dogma of stories she learned from her Catholic upbringing. Abel is particularly interested in the role once held by the church of commissioning and housing works of art and sees the modern institutions which now assume this role as proxy for modern religion.