Flashback no. 6: Paula Rego at Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris (21 Dec 2018)

Portuguese-born Paula Rego doesn't paint to please the viewer, she paints to disorientate them. Her canvasses tell uncomfortable, ambiguous and sometimes downright disturbing stories that we struggle to make sense of. And the longer we stand in front of them, the more we are intrigued and confused, often nowhere near understanding what the painting is about. But in there lies the beauty, the depth of her art.

Always defying the established conventions of the bourgeoisie she was born into and the dogmas of religion and society at large, Rego creates 'cruel tales' (whence the title of the exhibition) populated by eerie-looking, distorted characters that subvert roles and dynamics. Her distinctive figurative style merges the literary, the religious, the political and the personal giving life to a dream-like reality where people, mostly women, look both elated and miserable, kind and evil. We will never know which, but we can have a good guess.

Rego, whose childhood was spent under Salazar's fascist regime, candidly admits “it’s not very nice to live inside my mind". She apparently also suffers from nightmares. Of course she does, we see them in her large, haunting pastels, shrouded in dark secrets and unspoken truths. These are scenes that ooze pain, anger, resentment and speak of dysfunctional relationships and open wounds. Rego's visual universe is truly unique in that it's full of juxtapositions and twist and turns, none of which we should expect to understand.

#paularego #femaleartist #figurativepainting #pastel #orangerie #paris

The Dance, 1988

The Family, 1988

The Maids,1987

The Policeman's Daughter, 1987

Flashback no. 5: Joan Semmel at Jewish Museum, New York (26 August 2017)

We have all been there, we've all experienced that feeling when we step into a room and we feel a work of art is 'calling' us. And I, for one, love succumbing to that irresistible lure, to the power emanated by a painting that is working its magic leaving me humbled, intrigued and seduced. Well, this is exactly what happened on that rainy (if memory serves) day at the Jewish Museum in NYC, one of the smaller, but by no means lesser gems of New York's Museum Mile.

So what does Joan Semmel's Sunlight have that I found so irresistible? This dazzling self-portrait has form, scale, courage, light, shadows, honesty, warmth, freedom, truth, mystery, introspection, perspective, eroticism, innocence, empowerment, questions and answers. This is a painting that tells a story I could immediately relate to before knowing anything about the artist, there was no need to read the blurb to understand or connect.

Joan Semmel (b.1932) focuses her practice on the issues of representation of the body, sexuality and desire. In this painting, she is boldly looking at herself, unafraid of what she sees. Semmel's fearless gaze has the confidence every woman dreams of and should aspire to. In Sunlight, I felt she was reclaiming her own body, offering it to us free from any male objectification.

The separation between male and female art irritates me, I find it irrelevant. For me, there is only good or bad art. But arguably the female universe has been, and still is, vastly underrepresented in museums the world over. This is the artist's pragmatic response to the as of yet unanswered question posed by Linda Nochlin 7 years before this extraordinary painting was made: “If there are no great, celebrated women artists, that’s because the powers that be have not been celebrating them, but not because they are not there.”

#joansemmel #selfportrait #americanart #jewishmuseum #lindanochlin #newyork ##artblog #artblogger #beyondthecanvasblog

Joan Semmel, Sunlight (1971), Jewish Museum, NYC

Semmel in front of her work. How fabulous is she? Photo: Wikipedia

Flashback no. 4: Egon Schiele's flowers at Leopold Museum, Vienna (27 January 2017)

The Leopold Museum in Vienna's MuseumsQuartier is one the many gems of the city's outstanding cultural offering, arguably among the richest in Europe. The museum offers a comprehensive overview of Austrian art from the second half of the 19th century and Modernism (incl. works by Klimt and Kokoschka) and is home to the largest Schiele collection in the world.

It's a rather tragic story that of Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele. After losing his dad to syphylis when he was only 14, he succumbed to the Spanish flu at the cruelly tender age of 28, only three days after his pregnant wife Edith. In light of such a premature demise, the breadth and complexity of his incredibly prolific practice look all the more impressive.

Schiele is of course better known for his erotically-charged nudes and tormented self-portraits, but I immediately gravitated towards these extraordinary paintings. I will talk about his beautifully layered landscapes in another post.

The pictures are similar in their symmetrical composition, with the flower placed at the centre of the canvas. The fleshy purple iris stands out against a glowing gold background, while the cluster of chrysanthemums forcefully emerges from the dark. Neither of these highly stylised works is however about the actual representation of the flowers. What I see here are lines, patterns, shapes and blocks of colour coming together in an almost abstract composition. There is tension in these flowers, a certain restlessness, there is nothing gentle about them. On second thought, perhaps they are not that different from Schiele's twisted, writhing naked bodies after all.

#egonschiele #expressionism #leopoldmuseum #art #artblog #artblogger #beyonthecanvasblog

Stylized Flowers in Front of a Decorative Background (1908)

Chrysanthemum (1910)