Christine Aerfeldt & Elinor Evans
11 Sept 2008 to 19 Oct 2008
Wyer Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Christine Aerfeldt and Elinor Evans. The show features depictions of women by both artists who each explore constructs of female identity in western art and explore how women are figured and fashioned in contemporary popular culture.
Christine Aerfeldt's past work, informed by her Estonian heritage, featured kitsch figurines or dolls amongst manipulations of old master allegorical imagery. In a similar fusion of high and low cultures, her new paintings rethink Dutch 17th century genre paintings which show women within the domestic environment sewing, cleaning and cooking etc by depicting women, with postures derived from fashion models in magazines or on the catwalk, doing 'women's work' but re-contextualized within the landscape environment instead of inside the home.
Elinor Evans paintings are stylistically distinct from Aerfeldt's yet she presents images of women in a similarly fetishised context to her. However, she uses her own body in her paintings as an act of empowerment, celebration and culpability; she uses masks to hint at an underlying discomfort and often derives poses that are reworked from paintings of the 18th century masters. In this way, she comments on mythologies of women in art history and explores contemporary political notions of femininity. But her work's success is balanced on a taut interplay between playfulness, duplicity and eroticism.
Christine Aerfeldt is a graduate of Chelsea School of Art and, formerly, Adelaide Central School of Art. Her work is found in public and private collections across the world, most recently those of Charles Saatchi and David Roberts. Her first solo show in the UK is with Wyer Gallery next year.
Elinor Evans is a graduate of Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art where in 2004 she won the Amlin Prize for most promising young artist. Welsh by origin (she won the Young Wales Exhibition in Conwy, North Wales, last year) Evans currently divides her time between Wales, London and Spain where she exhibits regularly and is a founding member of The Shaman Project, a moving exhibition of music, art and performance that has been based in Salamanca and Bilbao. Her paintings can be found in public and private collections across the world including, in her native Wales, the Welsh Museum and National Welsh Assembly, Cardiff.
Images:
Left:
Elinor Evans
Posing with Lolita
Oil on canvas, 2008
156 x 191 cm
Right:
Christine Aerfeldt
Avalanche Knitter
Oil on canvas, 2008
200 x 150 cm
Courtesy of Wyer Gallery, London
Wyer Gallery
191 St. John's Hill
London, SW11 1TH
+44 020 7223 8433
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