This exhibition brought together approximately 70 paintings and drawings by Boston painter Hyman Bloom (1913–2009), drawn from public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and the Addison Gallery of American Art. Committed to figurative painting at a defining moment when abstraction was on the rise, Bloom combined the physical and the spiritual on canvas — exploring form and challenging conventional notions of beauty through paintings of the human body after death, autopsies, skeletal trees, and archaeological excavations, all rendered in thick paint and jewel-like tones that make the harrowing and the beautiful inseparable.

Color and layout. To accentuate the vivid colors in Bloom's work, the galleries were painted in contrasting black and white — the dark walls echoing the macabre content of the work while allowing the jewel-like tones of his paintings to fully assert themselves against them. Cases in the center of the larger galleries displayed Bloom's preparatory sketches, surrounded on the walls by the finished paintings — placing process and result in close conversation.