Thursday, August 21, 2014

Birth of Venus and Propped

Sandro Botticelli
Birth of Venus, 1485
Oil on canvas
172.5 x 278.5cm

Links
1. About the painting and influences
2. Uffizi Museum info
3. Humanism and Neoplatonism
Jenny Saville
Propped, 1992
Oil on canvas
213.5 x 183cm


Links
1. Article 1
2. Independent newspaper article on Saville - Propped
3. Re-invention of the beautiful
4. "Branded"









"Propped was the last piece I did for my degree show. And the quote is from a French feminist writer. I wanted the idea of a female body that is put on a pedestal to look at, to observe and it is almost like a bird the way I have painted it with the heel shoes and the connotation that brings in the language of women as birds or chicks."
Jenny Saville



The French text carved in reverse, to imply the self scrutiny of looking into a mirror, translates, 
“if we continue to speak in this sameness, speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other again”
By Feminist writer, Luce Irigaray



"There was "immense conviction" in making these pictures, she says, and an element of self-loathing. "There is in everybody. We are taught to judge ourselves from a very young age, to groom ourselves." And this creates a neurosis for women, she says. "You see this dichotomy in women's magazines all the time: an article on breast cancer - empowering; an article on skin products that make you look younger - neurotic."
Jenny Saville talking to Suzie Mackenzie in The Guardian, Saturday 22 October 2005



"More influential, more enduring in her work, is the experience of sitting in on plastic surgery operations. You realise something about the flesh, she says, when you see a surgeon put his hand through a woman's breast. Or smell the burning of a facial peel. You realise that the flesh is everything. "It's all things. Ugly, beautiful, repulsive, compelling, anxious, neurotic, dead, alive." And it is nothing. "Eventually we expel ourselves. We rust away. Our own body rejects us. I don't find that tragic."
Jenny Saville talking to Suzie Mackenzie in The Guardian, Saturday 22 October 2005

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Goya and Holzer

Francisco Goya
The Third of May, 1814
Oil on canvas
268 cm x 347 cm

1. website information 1
2. met museum
3. info site 3
4. Romanticism in Spain

Jenny Holzer
Torso, 2007
10 double-sided, curved electronic LED signs with red and blue diodes on front and blue and white diodes on back Text: U.S. government documents
219.2 x 146.8 x 73.4 cm (86.3 x 57.8 x 28.9 in)

Information link










"Jenny Holzer’s words ask us to consider our thoughts and actions in the world. This essentially humanist and philosophical project encourages us to seek self enlightenment through examining our prejudices, false beliefs, fall back positions, and habits, to reach a new level of tolerance, understanding and self awareness"

- Juliana Engberg, ACCA’s Artistic Director.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Comparing Sandro Botticelli and Jenny Saville - The Nude

Sandro Botticelli
Birth of Venus, 1485
Oil on canvas
172.5 x 278.5cm

1. About the painting and influences
2. Uffizi Museum info
Jenny Saville
Propped, 1992
Oil on canvas

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Wild Horses



Glenn Brown, Wild Horses, 2007
In Wild Horses, Glenn Brown distorts Jean Baptiste-Greuze’s Innocence (c.1790), a portrait of a young woman with a cherub-like face, draped in a swath of fabric tenderly cradling a lamb in her arms. Brown transforms the seemingly romantic image of purity and youth into a contemporary representation of the bizarre and the fantastic; the woman’s eyes have no pupils and her flesh morphs into swirling brushstrokes of acid yellow, and the lamb is displayed as vivid red with green eyes. By recontextualizing and mutating the original image, Brown’s masterful technique imbues it with another reading, inviting the viewer to examine the medium, the subject and the notion of beauty.






via http://www.flagartfoundation.org/exhibition/67/description

This link gives you a really close look at Glenn Brown's swirling technique. 
Jean Baptiste Greuze, Innocence, 1970