As a central principle of Western Art, realism seeks to "give a truthful, objective and impartial representation of the real world, based on meticulous observation of contemporary life." (Nochlin, 13) This idea has endured and developed since the nineteenth century as artists' desire to convey the honesty and sincerity of subject matter has grown. Therefore in connection with the recent class topic of gender and representation, I chose the image Passage as a realistic portrayal of contemporary society.Jenny Saville's painting Passage depicts a modern portrait of a transsexual. It is a dramatic expression of a body that challenges traditional canons of beauty. It also considers the artificial construction of the human form. In an interview conducted by Simon Schama, Jenny Saville said the following of her work:
"With the transvestite I was searching for a body that was between
genders. The idea of floating gender that is not fixed. The
transvestite I worked with has a natural penis and false silicone breasts.
Thirty or forty years ago this body couldn't have existed and I was looking for
a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a
visual passage through gender - a sort of gender landscape."
Contradicting standards of the female form is a theme throughout Saville's work. She is seemingly obsessed with translating paint into differing states of flesh. Observing plastic surgeries, medical specimens and forensic science images, Saville generates sensations of the body. She confronts the viewer with images of obese, deformed, and mutilated figures that explore the physicality of the form as well as the psychology of human suffering. I fell that she superbly marries abstraction with contemporary realism to redefine beauty as it exists in our society.
No comments:
Post a Comment