TwentyTwenty Women
Exhibition Screen Shot, on show Celia Rakontondrainy.
MADE IN BED’s Reviews Editor, Olivia Wilson, takes a look at Artistellar’s online exhibition TwentyTwenty Women. Olivia critiques the innovative viewing platform and reports on her virtual experience of engaging with the artworks.
In a pre-pandemic world there was little need for online exhibitions. However, they have rapidly become fundamental in how consumers engage with the art world today. Gone are the days of standing in front of an artwork for hours, quickly replaced by viewing art through screens, zooming in on their every detail. In my opinion, there is less sense of the collective whole of exhibitions when viewed online. They feel far more fragmented: one views paintings individually, instead of taking them in together as a whole, as one would in an exhibition room. Having said that, TwentyTwenty Woman on Artistellar successfully recreates the experience of seamlessly moving through an exhibition room, all from the comfort of one’s sofa.
Artistellar was created in 2020 by Adele Smejkal in response to a lack of engaging and innovative online gallery spaces. Artistellar focuses on emerging artists, helping them gain recognition in an increasingly competitive art world. The online gallery acts like a “brick mortar gallery without the bricks” and is confidently innovative, seeking to fill in the gap in coherent online gallery spaces. By clicking on arrows pointing in various directions one can virtually navigate around the exhibition space with fluid ease.
TwentyTwenty Women showcases six emerging artists. The exhibition title is taken from Mary Gabriel’s book, 9th Street Women (2018), which examined five female artists whose lives and art drove a revolution in modern art (Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan Joan Mitchell and Helen Fraknenthaler). The six artists featured here: Winnie Seifert, Celia Rakotondrainy, Sarah Longworth-West, Victoria Cantons, Xu Yang and Margaux Derhy, all present unique characters and approaches to painting. Across various painterly techniques, the artists focus on issues such as identity and ethnicity, power and intimacy.
The exhibition features a diverse range of work, from the figurative artwork of Celia Rakotondrainy and Xu Yang, to the more abstract and expressive work of Winnie Seifert and Sarah Longworth-West. In the abstract work of Winnie Seifert, she exits a figurative and pictorial world to delve into a world of sensations represented by paint. The works evoke emotive responses without reference to a protagonist, which is facilitated through her expressive, gestural brushstrokes and use of rich colours.
In Xu Yang’s figurative works, she draws on themes of femininity and fetishes. The simplicity of the female silhouettes in her two paintings Female Identity 29092020 and Female Identity 27092020 contrast against the ornate frames that surround them. Through her soft, almost ghostly, brushstrokes the figures are blurred, as if a veil is covering them, preventing them from being seen in detail. Yang provides a vague illusion of what may or may not be revealed: the only thing which is clear to the viewer is the subjects’ female identity.
Left: Female Identity 27092020, Right: Female Identity 29092020, Xu Yang.
Celia Rakotondrainy’s upbringing and artistic learning is steeped with cultural diversity: an international artist with Malagasy origins, having studied in Oxford, Paris and Germany. Perhaps this has gone some way in spurring on her desire to interrogate and comprehend the principle of identity and belonging in her artwork. Her works on show in this exhibition present intimate moments between the protagonists and the viewer. In Le Sourire Aux Yeux we are presented with the face of a woman, cropped so that we can only see one eye. However, even from this small fragment of the woman’s countenance, there is the hint of a smile in her eyes. Moreover, in Yesterday Was Tough But Tomorrow Will Be Better, Celia presents us with a portrait presented in a kaleidoscope effect. The differing angles and fragments perhaps represent the path to searching for one’s own identity: different environments and encounters proffer different perspectives on one’s self, demonstrating the inherent struggle of obtaining genuine self knowledge.
Yesterday Was Tough But Tomorrow Will Be Better, Celia Rakontondrainy.
Lastly, in another personal favourite from the exhibition Some Things You Shouldn’t Get Too Good At Or Where The Sky And The Big City Meet (After Fragonard) by Victoria Canton, female representation in classical 19th century portraiture is examined. The portrait of a woman is cropped from just below her nose to her chest. One has the sense that the woman’s gaze is cast downwards, perhaps as she is engaged in reading. Inspired by Jean-Honore Fragonard’s Young Girl Reading (1770), Cantons draws on themes of feminine virtuosity and the female devotion to the domestic.
Some Things You Shouldn’t Get Too Good At Or Where The Sky And The Big City Meet (After Fragonard), Victoria Cantons.
Overall, this online exhibition is cutting-edge in its technology, re-creating the reality of an exhibition room as best as can be done through technology. It presents six early-career female artists who I had not come across before and thus speaks to the intention of Artistellar: to scout and promote high-calibre emerging artists to enhance their careers. This exhibition goes far beyond the 2D images one is often presented with in online exhibitions and viewing rooms, going that extra step in attempting to re-create the feel of being at a physical exhibition.
Artistellar’s online exhibition TwentyTwenty Women ended on November 23rd 2020, however, is still available for viewing on the website under ‘Past Exhibitions’.
All imagery sourced from Artistellar.
Olivia Wilson
Reviews Editor, MADE IN BED