Every picture tells a story — and, sometimes, two pictures put together tell a different story.
That’s the idea behind a new exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, “Power Couples: The Pendant Format in Art,” which looks at paired artworks from the 1500s to today.
An artist might create two separate works, and pair them up as “a storytelling device,” said Leslie Anderson, curator of European, American and regional art for UMFA. “What couldn’t be represented by a single picture could be represented by works conceived as pairs.”
Anderson has gathered more than 30 pairs of artworks, mostly taken from UMFA’s permanent collection — some recently acquired, others sitting in storage for years.