Artists

Groupshow

Press release

Vedovi gallery is pleased to present Echoes Of The Feminine, an exhibition bringing together prominent modern and contemporary artists whose work navigates the fluid and expansive interpretations of the feminine form. Across this presentation, the female figure offers an opportunity to champion an homage to beauty while advancing artistic inquiry beyond acts of pure idealisation. Featuring artists Jean Arp, Balthus, Ellen Berkenblit, César, Claude Lalanne, Urs Fischer, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Giacometti, Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Henri Laurens, René Magritte, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Germaine Richier and John Wesley, Echoes Of The Feminine showcases the breadth with which the feminine subject continues to serve as a resonate site of enduring inspiration. Initiating an investigation of the representational impulse, the work of Pablo Picasso provides a fulcrum for the exhibition to unfold. Foregrounding drawing as an immediate and continually evolving mode of engagement with the female figure, Picasso repeatedly revised the subject of the feminine body by moving between naturalism and Cubist fragmentation. Nu couché (1969), of the artist's "late period", offers a radical simplification of line and gesture in favour of a freedom of form. The drawing reveals a distillation of the artist's immense oeuvre into a feminine representation reduced to an economy of line. Picasso pushes volumes between figure and ground, forming a playful erotics of relations that have historically entwined the artist and his subjects. This striking nude underscores Picasso's spirit, describing his continued infatuation with a raw and gestural energy at the autumn of his life. It is through the sculptural language of the body in which the practices of César, Claude Lalanne and Jean Arp reveal diverse approaches to the figure. César's Sein (1965) exemplifies a postwar expansion of sculpture that incorporates a renewed engagement with representation. His casting of the body, applying plaster directly on the figure, compresses the space between representation and facsimile. Here, the breast of Crazy Horse dancer Victoria von Krupp is rendered as a single polished bronze, distilling sensuality and performance into revered permanence. Claude Lalanne's sculptures inject a surreal acuity that spans both figuration and design. Main Fenouille (c.1985), produced in galvanized copper and bronze, casts a hand as sprouting from a fennel root. Lalanne's fantastical works merge human and nature through a whimsical reimagining of interrelations. Conversely, Arp's The woman of Delos (1959) emerges through a combined approach to classical antiquity and abstraction. The reclining figure describes a sculptural poetics of biomorphic forms at odds with anatomical precision. As distinctive poles, these artists compress the corporeal into familiar, stoic, and organic volumes where the feminine is maintained as a generative conceptual tool and formal principle. An enigmatic register emerges in the exhibition by complicating ideals of conventional feminine beauty, as is synonymous with the iconic legacy of René Magritte. In Untitled (c.1940s), the artist collapses the distinction between figure and object. This fine graphite drawing compares the statuesque body of a woman with an amphora, a poignant surreal metaphor of objectification quintessential of Magritte's visual wit. Germaine Richier's sculptural bronzes, of which two examples are exhibited here, extend such surreal disruptions; however, as a hybrid metamorphosis. As the first woman to ever exhibit at the Musée National d'Art Modern during her lifetime, Richer's work was formed in response to the horrific traumas of the post-war period. L'Araignée II, moyenne (1956) exemplifies the artist's melding of human and animal forms essential to Richier's work, creating a mode of figuration that is at once fragile and uncannily resilient. Emerging in the post modern era, the works of Urs Fischer and John Wesley frequently subvert familiar methods of representation through a visual vocabulary of Pop Art and classical Hollywood glamour. In Blanched (2011), featured in the 2012 solo presentation Madame Fisscher at the Pinault Foundation, Venice, Fischer employs enlargement and juxtaposition to transform a colourized portrait of a movie starlet. Rendered to the scale of advertising, this work recasts a promotional headshot into the image of contemporary femininity as an industrial product. Similarly, Wesley approaches his subject in Mary Lou & Her Sister (1992) through appropriating the flatness and graphic repetition of an idealized midcentury. Wesley's contours are emblematic of Warhol or Lichtenstein, yet they critique the cold commodification of the female body as a superficial image. By reducing the feminine to an almost emblematic sign, both Fisher and Wesley demonstrate the construction of the feminine ideal as a consumer product and an essential image of collective memory.