Material Girls and their Muses @ VITRINE, London
VITRINE, Fitzrovia proudly presents Material Girls and their Muses, a group exhibition featuring the work of five female-identifying sculptors with material-led practices alongside their chosen muses. This exhibition, curated by Marcelle Joseph, is a restaging of an exhibition Joseph initially curated in 2014 in a disused space in the diamond district of London’s Hatton Garden. Appropriating Madonna’s 1984 theme song in the title, this exhibition interrogates both gender and the meaning of the muse. Muses throughout art history have been characterized as passive, powerless female models at the beck and call of a dominant, influential older male artist. This exhibition turns that romanticised definition of an artist and his muse on its heads: all featured artists identify as female, femme or non-binary, and the exhibition goes back to the ancient Greek origins of the word ‘muse’ when muses were far removed from being submissive feminine objects of desire. In Greek mythology, the Nine Muses were in fact brilliant, accomplished goddesses of the arts, humanities and sciences. These muses had their own agency to influence others. And in this exhibition, the chosen muses – all artists in their own right - serve as active, powerful agents of inspiration for the five featured artists from a younger generation.
The title of this show may contain the word ‘girls’ and ‘muses’, but these ten artists, regardless of their gender, use materiality, whether it be expressed through bronze, clay, paper, jesmonite, wood, fabric, latex, found objects or their own body, to tell stories powered by their female/femme lived experience. As Aindrea Emelife wrote in her text for the original exhibition in 2014, ‘If these artists were in the pulpit, their muses in the choir, I would totes be at church every Sunday morning’.
In the first pairing, London-based Spanish artist Saelia Aparicio chose the late Danish self-taught artist Ovartaci (1894 - 1985) as her muse. Like Ovartaci, Aparicio creates fictional worlds that exist in a liminal space between fiction and reality, human and post-human, presenting hybrid bodies that are both terrifying and brimming with humour, inviting the viewer to journey where other rules apply. Ovartaci was an artist whose art and life broke with societal expectations and norms. Over the course of 56 years living in a psychiatric hospital in a small city in Denmark, the house painter born Louis Marcussen and assigned male at birth reincarnated themself anew as the female artist named Ovartaci, which loosely translates as ‘Chief Lunatic’. During this period, Ovartaci created drawings, paintings and sculptures that feature their signature chimerical world of slim, elongated alien women and animal figures, melding species together into mythical and majestic creatures. Aparicio is a creator of speculative universes too, employing the tools of sculpture and drawing and a myriad of materials and processes, such as mouth blown glass, ceramics and found objects, to shape these ecosystems fuelled by the artist’s imagination. Both artists draw on classical mythology and ancient cultures as inspiration. In Ovartaci’s double-sided painting, signed with one of their many aliases, a cat-woman among the various reptilian figures shares a likeness with Sehkmet, the Egyptian goddess of both war and healing who could avert plague and cure disease for her friends. The institutionalized Ovartaci no doubt was very intrigued by this patron of physicians and healers. The hybrid bodies created by both Aparicio and Ovartaci could be described as mutant or Other, but these characters come to life in their own fantastical worlds and perhaps offer the possibility of the transcendence of their souls, a belief that was central to Ancient Egyptian society. London-based Italian artist Ludovica Gioscia (b. 1977) looked across the Atlantic for her agent of divine inspiration - the New York-based American artist Polly Apfelbaum (b. 1955). Their respective multidisciplinary artistic practices share many formal qualities, namely their vibrant colour palette and use of pattern. Raised in Rome in the eighties, Gioscia was moulded by the layering of the Baroque and the Memphis Design movement in Italy at that time. Apfelbaum instead grew up in Pennsylvania and studied fine art there and in New York, moving to New York City after art school in 1978. There, influenced by Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art, Apfelbaum created her own unique style of working that incorporates an energy, playfulness and wit alongside her feminist outlook and love of popular culture. Both artists make two-dimensional and three-dimensional works that incorporate textiles, clay, found objects and other tactile elements traditionally associated with craft and domesticity. In this exhibition, the viewer experiences the ceramic work of Apfelbaum and the textile work of Gioscia with all its extravagant colour and hallucinatory pattern as a materially rich and textured ride around the colour wheel, but underneath it all, a painterly experimentation in three dimensions. Gioscia weaves her lived experience, love of process, historical influences and dream analysis into her wearable textile Lab Coat sculpture and the hanging textile work that is part of her Portal series. Apfelbaum meanwhile channels memories from her youth growing up in Pennsylvania surrounded by the repeated patterns and motifs of quilts and barn decorations as well as the tradition of Pennsylvania German terracotta. The wavy and star-studded ceramic and textile works in this exhibition celebrate these artists’ mutual love of materiality, design, colour and pattern.
New York-based Brazilian-American artist Sacha Ingber (b. 1987) selected the late Swiss artist Heidi Bucher (1926-1993) as her Calliope. Both artists are known for their references to the architectonic reality of the body through an ingenious exploration of materiality, domesticity and memory. Whereas Bucher pursued a distinct approach to sculpture that fused performance with her exploration of fashion, textiles, domesticity and architecture, Ingber is more influenced by Pop and post-modern design as well as her lived experience growing up between Brazil and America. Ingber combines found objects with traditional techniques of craft, mould-making and trompe-l’oeil, while Bucher embalms bodies, women’s garments and the built environment in latex-soaked gauze, exhibiting these skins with all of their visceral crevices, fossil-like memories and embedded trauma. Both artists focus on architecture and the body as a way to examine psychologically inhabited interior and exterior spaces. In this show, Ingber’s work on display is a hybrid body of sorts, intimated through women’s clothing on a wooden limbed frame, that transforms into a log cabin in the viewer’s imagination, hinting at how visual languages and aesthetic choices can take on attitudes of rebellion, exuberance and humour.
As a British-Singaporean artist who questions the much maligned category of the ornamental in her practice, Hannah Lim (b. 1998) has singled-out Japanese artist Mariko Mori (b. 1967) as her muse. This pairing features two artists with East Asian origins that make provocative multidisciplinary work that critically examines their respective culture’s past and present aesthetic influences as a way of pushing against fixed notions of gender and race and envisioning a new future. In Mori’s very first video Miko No Inori (Prayer of the Priestess) made in 1996 and featured in this exhibition, Mori uses fashion, pop culture and science fiction as aesthetic templates. Using these motifs, Mori melds Eastern and Western forms to weave a visual narrative about the limiting, stereotypical roles available to Japanese women in this high-gloss digital dreamscape, while also acknowledging the growing creative role of technology. Lim examines her own mixed cultural background in her work that mines Orientalism, the colonial romanticisation of the East. Lim makes richly-hued, anthropomorphic sculptures and intricate drawings that often take the form of eighteenth-century Chinoiserie, such as snuff bottles and drawings of ancient Chinese and medieval bestiaries. Through the production of these decorative artistic objects,Lim seeks to reclaim and reimagine a dialogue between East and West, while examining the complex configurations of power and identity conferred throughout history by the portrayal of East and South East Asian femininity as inherently ornamental. In Lim’s words, she ‘resonate[s] with Mori’s reference to traditional Japanese aesthetics and imagery, reimagined in the form of futuristic characters and environments. This imagery within Mori’s work feels slightly reminiscent of the colourful and often playful reimaging of traditional Chinese designs within my own practice’.
The central protagonists in the two featured works by British artist Cathie Pilkington (b. 1968, UK) and her muse British artist Marion Adnams (b. 1898, UK, d. 1995, UK), who both hail from the North of England, echo in form but not species or medium. The first is a near life-sized patinated bronze sculpture of a young girl standing on her tip toes with a cool 60’s vibe given her pixie haircut and mod garb. The second is a painting of a many-limbed totemic piece of driftwood, standing as if posing for a portrait at the top of a hill on a moonlit night overlooking an epic landscape of snow-covered mountains. Pilkington imagines Twinkle (2014) ‘as a kind of pre-pubescent psychopomp – a conductor of spirits – a girl-shaped object caught up in her painted bronze unconscious’. Adnams’s anthropomorphic wood root depicted in oil paint is another sort of material transformation, coming alive under the moonlit sky. Breathing human life into wood is no mean feat but Adnams was well known for her surrealist dreamscapes inspired by the close observation of objects from nature or her beloved local Derby Museum. Adnams wrote in her diary:
‘I am attracted to things which create an atmosphere or period of time, such as skulls, shells and objects from the natural world, and it is always their form which fascinates me as though I were a sculptor. My unusually vivid imagination causes things to become active in my mind and when I begin to paint “seriously” I am always drawn to some particular thing which I paint out of its proper setting and my original subject is relegated to the background.’
Although these two artists do not share a common medium, they do both explore the material transformation of observed objects, breathing life into sculptural materials. Upon closer observation, Twinkle’s patterned tights made from patinated bronze become a gauzy textured polyester before your very eyes, tempting the viewer to pick up and play with this 250 kg figurine as if it was one of the artist’s cheap 1950’s fabric dolls she was collecting at the time this work was made.