The Exhibition 'Gilded' Wants Us to Consider That Which Does Not Glitter 

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• Courtesy of the Artist And L.A. Louver/Hood Museum
• "Invincible Kings of This Mad Mad World" by Gajin Fujita

In "Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth," gold is an idea as well as a material embellishment. The traveling exhibition, curated by Emily Stamey of the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, N.C., is now on view at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, N.H. The show asks us to "reconsider our value systems" as the application of gold on artwork purports to draw attention to overlooked or marginalized subjects.

The 17-artist exhibition sets up a conundrum. How does adding 24-karat gold to an already precious commodity — contemporary art — critique how we assign value and worth to it? Does the prevalence of gold in the exhibition direct viewers' focus to the underlying sociopolitical messages embedded in some of the works? Or does it simply dazzle?

The first piece a visitor encounters upon entering is Sherin Guirguis "Larmes d'Isis II," a towering sculpture approximately 30 feet high. It consists of wooden teardrops strung randomly among five thick nautical ropes, which are suspended from the ceiling and splay out upon a round base. The teardrops feature white, gray and gold geometric patterns; bits of gold leaf appear on the tips of the ropes at the base of the sculpture.

Guirguis, an Egypt-born, Los Angeles-based artist, pays tribute to a poem by Egyptian feminist Doria Shafik and relays themes of the Isis and Osiris myth. From a distance, the sculpture resembles the behemoth spinal column of a long-extinct beast.

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• Courtesy Of Hood Museum
• Foreground: “Larmes d’Isis II"by Sherin Guirguis

Adjacent to this is Ecuadorean artist Ronny Quevedo's "Zoot Suit Riot at Qoricancha," a painterly take on collage. The 4-by-8-foot work, inspired by zoot suit patterns, presents a maplike motif. Some of the pattern sections are filled in with gold and silver leaf, which highlight their crisp, elegant contours.

Text such as "Vogue Pattern," along with descriptions of the parts of the garment to which the geometric shapes correspond, are interwoven throughout the abstract pattern. Each layer is like an object lesson in the fraught history of the distinctive men's suit, from its origins in African American communities in the 1930s to its role in the so-called Zoot Suit Riots involving servicemen and Latino youth in Los Angeles in 1943.

"Invincible Kings of This Mad Mad World," by LA artist Gajin Fujita, is a four-panel painting more than 16 feet long. The billboard-size work features large flowers, a stylized lion and a blue-skinned demon painted in a graphic, Japanese tattoo-art style. These subjects are set against a dense network of graffiti that is layered atop a gilded backdrop.

"Blue Puddles," by Brooklyn-based Summer Wheat, merges decorative appeal, formal complexity and visual impact. The 68-by-141-inch painting is an Edenic tableau of cartoonish female figures who gaze at their reflections in black pools of water. The scene is delightfully witchy — a vibe that's enhanced by the palette: pale blue, violet and black with highlights of gold and neon pink throughout.

A sample swatch that demonstrates Wheat's process is located in a small plaque next to the piece. Essentially, gouache and acrylic paint are applied to the verso of aluminum mesh; the image we see is the result of the paint squeezing through the mesh. The invitation to experience the work's tactility is a welcome touch. The gesture also underscores Wheat's "themes of labor and its values," as described by Stamey in her catalog essay.

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• Courtesy of Weatherspoon Art Museum | Hood Musuem
• "Olympia Triptych" by Hung Liu

Another standout is Hung Liu's "Olympia Triptych," in which the late Chinese-born American artist reimagined Édouard Manet's 1863 "Olympia." The French painter's then-scandalous oil painting portrays a sex worker in a brothel setting. Liu based her 41-by-95-inch work on a historical photograph of a Chinese prostitute reclining in the classic odalisque pose. The photograph came from a cache of vernacular 19th-century images that Liu found and frequently based work on. Here, she seamlessly fused photography, lithography, traditional Chinese painting techniques and expressionistic, gestural painting — including metal leaf — to create a fraught yet harmonious image.

"Gilded" offers a veritable treasure chest brimming with shimmering works that point to issues beyond their material opulence — albeit with mixed results. The show's shortcoming has more to do with the Weatherspoon's original curatorial strategy. There's plenty of satisfying art to look at, yet gold tends to draw attention to itself rather than the work's subject matter. As a result, the abundance of gold signals luxury and, at times, excess. The intrinsic beauty of gold and its connections to taste, wealth and opulence tends to obscure, rather than illuminate, the subtle narratives that "Gilded" would like to highlight.