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    in Exhibitions

    ‘An Artist Is a Visionary’: Cameroonian Artist Barthélémy Toguo on an Artist’s Social Role and How His Work Presaged the Events of 2020

    The Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris reopened last week with its first solo show dedicated to a contemporary African artist: Barthélémy Toguo. Displayed alongside historical African artworks, the Cameroonian multimedia artist’s exhibition addresses viruses, immigration, the lynching of African Americans, African dictators, and the shortage of water.
    Titled “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo,” it is curated by Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau, director of Fondation Dapper. Launched in Amsterdam in 1983 by Michel Leveau to support African and Caribbean art, the foundation was given carte blanche for the exhibition.
    Particularly pertinent is Vaincre le virus! (Beat the virus) (2016). The six-and-a-half feet tall vases depicting bats, red hands, and patterns relating to the transmission of the Ebola and HIV viruses were realized five years ago when Toguo was nominated for the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp. After carrying out research with scientists at the Institut Pasteur in Paris to glean ideas on how to convey the viruses visually, Toguo had the vases produced in Jingdezhen, China, which is renowned for ceramics.
    “In 2016, I talked about the problem of viruses and how we should encourage scientists to find the viruses that are threatening the world—it was a universal message but nobody listened to me,” Toguo told Artnet News. “Then in 2020 came the worldwide problem of Covid-19 that mobilized the world of science and medicine.”
    Barthélémy Toguo, Strange Fruit. Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
    Nearby is the disquieting installation Strange Fruit (2017). Next to an empty noose tied to a branch are a swooping vulture, crows and aggressive dogs all in brass. Vinyl records from Billie Holiday’s 1939 record about lynchings in the American South, the sleeves painted with an open-mouthed face, are scattered among the branches. “I wanted to talk about the mistreatment of Black people and then a few years later [the murder of] George Floyd happened,” Toguo said.
    Born in Cameroon in 1967, Toguo studied at the fine arts school of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, then in Grenoble and the Dusseldorf arts academy. In Dusseldorf, he was taught by the Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis and encountered Tony Cragg.
    In 2015, his work featured in the Venice Biennale, eight years after he refused to participate in the African Pavilion organized by the Sindika Dokolo Foundation. “The proposal was reductive because Africa is not a country but a region and I maintain my position about that problematic ghettoization of African artists,” he said. “My stance upset the Italians.”
    It was reading the French author Albert Camus’s 1957 Nobel Prize speech, about an artist’s obligation to move the largest number of people by offering an image of common suffering and joy, that instilled in Toguo his sense of mission.
    “Camus’s thoughts on the role of an artist fascinated me,” Toguo recalled. “I told myself that I have a role in society to bring a message. For me, an artist is a visionary who has the capacity to look into the future, see societal problems and inform people through his production.”
    Barthélémy Toguo, Water Matters (2020). Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
    Some artworks evoke ideas metaphorically. Road to Exile (2008)—a wooden boat overflowing with cushions in African fabrics and surrounded by innumerable bottles of water—expresses the precariousness of young Africans trying to reach Europe in boats that might capsize. The newest work, Water Matters (2020), made for the exhibition, comprises a painting of a figure with outstretched palms in front of a table lined with glass bottles. It pertains to Toguo’s desire to redistribute water between countries that have too little and those that have too much.
    Around 50 works by Toguo are presented along with historical African artworks from Fondation Dapper, the Musée du Quai Branly, and other collections that find a resonance with his pieces. The first two parts showcase works relating to the body, such as a painting of bleeding hands wounded by nails.
    “I tried to identify recurring elements in Barthélémy Toguo’s work and noticed the presence in his paintings and drawings of nails, which hark back to Christ and the crucifixion, but also to objects used by people in Congo to master negative forces,” Falgayrettes-Leveau said. “Although he didn’t consciously reflect upon this aspect of African heritage, they’re unconscious references.”
    Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
    Toguo’s engagement as an artist extends far beyond his own practice. In 2013, he created Bandjoun Station in Cameroon, encompassing an art center, artists’ residency and coffee plantation. “There was no place to celebrate art in Cameroon and, with all my experience, I needed to give something back to Africa,” said Toguo, who divides his time between Cameroon and Paris. “All my artistic production was in western museums like Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou and MoMA.”
    Vocal about the need for the African continent to acquire artworks by its artists, Toguo added: “Whereas African masks were stolen by colonizers and remained in the west, contemporary works by Romuald Hazoumè, Chéri Samba and El Anatsui have been bought by western museums who recognize their value. But there is nothing in Africa because politicians don’t know [about contemporary art]. So I’ve created a space for artistic exchanges. Kounellis gave me three drawings and artists worldwide have given me works that I’ve installed alongside African artists like Soly Cissé and Siriki Ky.”
    The Musée du Quai Branly, which is restituting 26 works to Benin, has been called upon by a group of African activists to restitute more pieces to the continent. But that is a “different issue”, pointed out Toguo, who was clearly elated about his solo show: “I’m astonished and moved because this is the first time that this curatorial eye has been applied to my work.”
    “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” is on view at Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris through December 5.
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    in Exhibitions

    Sean Scully Opened His Studio to the Public to Showcase the Gripping Paintings He Made During Lockdown—See Them Here

    After more than a year working in isolation, Sean Scully decided to go in the opposite direction. He swung open the doors of his studio to invite art lovers in. The Irish-American artist’s latest exhibition, “12 Black Windows,” takes place in two parts—at Lisson Gallery’s space on 24th Street and Scully’s own Chelsea workspace. (Visits can be scheduled here). 
    Inside the studio, one encounters The 12 (2020), a 12-panel grouping of new paintings in his ongoing “Landline” series. They range from joyous to somber in their tones and seem to echo the range of emotions felt over the past year, from tragedy to jubilation and relief.
    Though these works still engage the alternating bands of color that have defined “Landline” series since Scully began it over 20 years ago, they are rooted in the experiences of the global pandemic, quarantine, Black Lives Matter protests, and mass uncertainty that Scully experienced firsthand in New York. In the studio, the works occupy their own room and act almost like sentries at a fortified structure or pillars in a temple, conferring a sense of gravity in opposition to the unpredictability of the outside world. 
    “The world in which we live, the existential threat from COVID, and the environmental problems we face have influenced me greatly in my art,” the artist said in a statement.
    In the gallery, the exhibition continues with Dark Windows (2020), a suite of five works created at the height of the pandemic. Here, Scully introduces a new element, the seemingly sinister black square—an allusion to Malevich’s 1915 Black Box. The shape—which evokes censors, stunned silence, and even “Blackout Tuesday” Instagram posts—represents a departure for Scully, whose work normally calls to mind open landscapes and horizon lines.
    “There is no doubt that they are a response to the pandemic and to what mankind has been doing to nature,” Scully said. “What really strikes me as tragic is that what is a relief for nature is a torment for us. And what is a pleasure for us is a torment for nature. That seems to be the conundrum that we’ve got ourselves into.”
    See the installation of “12 Black Windows” and get an inside look at the show below.

    “Sean Scully: 12 Black Windows” is on view at Lisson Gallery through June 18, 2021.
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    in Street Art

    “BTC Flower Vs Elon” by Ludo in Paris, France

    French street artist Ludo recently worked on a striking new piece in Paris. Entitled “BTC Flower Vs Elon”, this crypto-currency mural features Ludo’s iconic Bitcoin flower with a tombstone of billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk.We all know (even Elon) that Lithium-ion batteries are needed to make our electronic devices work, and the batteries use rare mineral cobalt. This is a very precious mineral, with over 60% of world production originating in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this country and others, it is still estimated that some 40,000 children have to work in these mines to collect this mineral instead of going to school, playing or simply experiencing childhood.According to an Amnesty International report, children work for at least 12 hours a day without protective equipment in deep underground shafts around 10 metres long, which they have often dug themselves, putting their lives in danger. This is what we create to make sure our electric tools and hybrid vehicles are always fully charged.“BTC Flower Vs Elon” is available as a unique NFT original work on Foundation later this afternoon (May 19th, 6pm CET)Proceeds from the sale will be donated to Pure Earth. Pure Earth works in highly polluted locations in the developing world with the intent of mitigating human health risks from pollution. They identify toxic hot spots and teach communities how to improve soil, water and air quality with cost effective solutions. Thanks to productive interventions, Pure Earth aim to reduce the impacts of toxic pollution on local communities. More

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    in Exhibitions

    Mark Bradford, Carrie Mae Weems, and 10 Others Will Make Art Reflecting on the Legacy of the Great Migration for an Ambitious 2022 Show

    Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, and Carrie Mae Weems are among the dozen artists who will reflect on the cultural legacy of the Great Migration in an ambitious opening next year at the Mississippi Museum of Art and Baltimore Museum of Art.
    The exhibition, “Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration,” which is set to open at the Mississippi Museum in April 2022, before traveling to Baltimiore in October, also includes new commissions from artists Akea Brionne Brown, Zoë Charlton, Larry W. Cook, Torkwase Dyson, Allison Janae Hamilton, Leslie Hewitt, Steffani Jemison, Robert Pruitt, and Jamea Richmond-Edwards.
    “The project is grounded in a key prompt,” said Mississippi Museum chief curator Ryan Dennis and Baltimore Museum associate curator Jessica Bell Brown, who co-organized the show, in a joint statement. “‘What would happen if today’s leading artists were given the space to think about the intersections of the Great Migration in a wholistic, expansive, and dynamic way?’”
    The artists, all of whom are Black, work in practices that “deal with personal and communal histories, familial ties, the Black experience, and the ramifications of land ownership and environmental shifts, among so much more, to consider how we can expand our understanding of this essential moment in American history,” the curators added.  

    Seeking economic opportunities and freedom from Jim Crow laws, more than six million African Americans relocated from the post-Reconstruction South to urban areas in the West, Midwest, and Northeastern U.S. from 1916 through the 1970s. The Great Migration, as the phenomenon was called, forever changed the creative landscape of the country. 
    Accompanying the show will be a two-volume publication, including newly commissioned essays by writers Kiese Laymon, Jessica Lynne, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and Willie J. Wright.
    “The exhibition will attend to and complicate histories of racial violence, trauma, and socio-economic exigency, while also examining the agency seized by those who fled as well as those who stayed behind,” said Dennis and Brown. “In many ways, the story of the Great Migration is neither complete in its current telling nor finished in its contemporary unfolding.”
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    in Exhibitions

    The Rijksmuseum’s Timely Exhibition on the History of Slavery Focuses on the Individual Stories of Those Who Lived Through It

    The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has unveiled its landmark exhibition, “Slavery” (through August 29), an unprecedented survey of 10 personal stories of those who were involved in the slave trade, either as profiteers or victims, as it made its way across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and into the Netherlands’ various colonies.
    The show, which has been four years in the making, includes 140 objects from the 17th through 19th centuries, and includes two towering Rembrandt portraits of Oopjen Coppit and Marten Soolmans, who were the ultra-wealthy beneficiaries of a sugar refinery, as well as disturbing artifacts such as collars that were forced on enslaved peoples and gifts exchanged between an African monarch and a slave trader.

    Among the stories told is that of Wally, an enslaved man forced to work a sugar plantation in the colony of Suriname. Along with others, Wally organized a failed revolt on the plantation and fled, a crime for which he was executed by immolation in 1707.
    In an audio presentation, his history is narrated by Surinamese-Dutch former kickboxing world champion Remy Bonjasky, whose ancestors worked on the same plantation. Wally’s “blood,” Bonjasky said in the recording, “has been passed down through generations, and is one of the reasons why I was able to become a kickboxing world champion three times.”
    Valika Smeulders, the head of history at the Rijksmuseum said that, through such true-to-life storytelling, the show gives “insight into how individuals dealt with legalized injustice.”

    Unknown, Multiple leg cuffs for chaining enslaved people, with 6 loose shackles, ca. 1600–1800. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, schenking van de heer J.W. de Keijzer, Gouda.
    “By delving into [the history of slavery], we can form a more complete picture of our history and a better understanding of today’s society,” Rijksmuseum general director Taco Dibbits said in a statement, pointing out that these stories are integral to the Dutch past. The Dutch king Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, whose descendants were profiteers of the trade, was given a first tour of the exhibition by Dibbits.
    Dutch traders forcibly brought at least 600,000 Africans to North and South America. They also moved 1.1 million people across and through the Indian Ocean. Among the country’s former territories are Caribbean islands such as Aruba, Curaçao, and Saint Martin’s. One of the country’s largest colonies was modern-day Indonesia.
    For now, before the show can be opened to the wider public, it will be accessible to student tour groups.
    See images of the exhibition below.
    Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
    Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
    Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
    Augustus van Bengalen Holding Hendrik Cloete’s Pipe (1788). Source: Anonymous. Courtesy Rijksmuseum.
    Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
    Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
    Enslaved Men Digging Trenches (1850) Source: Rijksmuseum with support from the Johan Huizinga Fonds.
    Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
    Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum

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    in Exhibitions

    This Year’s Made in L.A. Biennial Highlighted Art That Was Actually Made in a Lot of Other Places—and That’s a Good Thing

    Purple velvety body suits hang limply from the walls and ceiling, like regal, deflated aliens. You can see them through a human-sized hole cut into one of the four walls of the late artist Nicola L.’s La Chambre en fourrure (The Fur Room) (1969/2020). On the outside are arm and leg holes, so that, in a previous time, people could put their limbs through, activating these furry body suits and even reaching out to caress those who wandered inside.
    “I wanted to oblige people to participate,” Nicola L. said of this body of work, which she called her pénétrables, back in the 1980s. Today, however, will not be obliged, or even allowed, to participate while it is installed at the Hammer Museum, as part of the Made in L.A. Biennial. Instead, we’ll have to imagine the kind of intimacy the installation was meant to invite, thanks to a global pandemic that has left it seeming more radically sensual than it possibly ever did.
    The biennial, titled “a version” and installed across two museums, was supposed to open in June 2020, but instead privately debuted in November to just a smattering of press and VIPs. The institutions and the show’s curators, Lauren Mackler, Myriam Ben Salah, and Ikechukwu Casmir Onyewuenyi, opted to place only a few programs online and, now that it has opened to the public, that seems like a wise decision.
    Rather than try to adjust and normalize what wasn’t normal, the show’s organizers left it largely unseen until viewers could experience it as it was meant to be. And there are, thankfully, more interesting aspects to dwell on than the pandemic’s effect, including the newly flexible connection some of the artist have to Los Angeles. The event has been plagued by boosterish, L.A.-centric language since its inception, in 2012, even as a biennial made just for L.A. began to seem needlessly provincial.
    The artist Nicola L. moved to Los Angeles 18 months before her death, in 2019, and built her Fur Room while based between Paris and Ibiza. Other works in the show were made by artists not currently in L.A., like Ser Serpas, who is from Los Angeles but lives in Zurich. Unable to travel for the installation, Serpas instructed others in Los Angeles to scavenge the city for the curbside detritus that comprises two installations, one elegantly scrappy in the Hammer’s antiseptic first-floor gallery, and the other a symphony of discarded printers and domestic objects (dresser drawers, an upside-down ironing board) in a yard across the county at the Huntington.
    Some artists are relatively new arrivals to the city; others are based here and elsewhere. (Even if previous editions also included artists with roots outside the city, the link to the local has tended to feel more blatant, such as through the 2014 focus on the L.A.’s alternative spaces). This loose relationship to residential status is welcome, given how much Los Angeles has changed as an art scene in the past decade. The increasingly international gallery scene has made other cities feel like worthier contenders for its formerly romanticized underdog status, and the skyrocketing cost of living has prompted artists who once chose the city for affordability to look elsewhere.
    Made in L.A. 2020: a version. Installation view at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino. Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com.
    But if the artists’ residential status no longer matters so much, place and site still do. The biennial is spread across two main locations—the Hammer’s Westwood building and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens—both containing work by each of the show’s 30 artists. This format was proposed by the Huntington, located 25 minutes away in San Marino, as a way to “unite east and west,” according to its president, Karen Lawrence.
    But it is notable that the “east” chosen here was San Marino, which has a lower minimum wage than Los Angeles and a median income that’s nearly six times higher, and not East Los Angeles, the unincorporated area east of downtown that has one of the highest population densities in the county and is 97 percent Hispanic.
    In 2017, scholar and poet, Cecilia Caballero, described driving with her friend and son from their East L.A. home to see the Huntington’s exhibition of the Octavia Butler archive, and watching “the landscape shifting from a brown space to a white space as we traversed from freeway to freeway, through smog and sunlight.”
    Installation view, Nicola L.’s La Chambre en fourrure (1969/2020). Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com.
    When going anywhere becomes an exception to the rule, as it has this past year, accessibility becomes ever more crucial, and the Huntington is difficult to reach by public transportation, and admission is expensive ($25 to $29 for adults). In contrast, admission has been free at the Hammer since early 2014. (Visitors to Made in L.A. can receive a voucher for free admission to the Huntington portion of the show, but they must visit the Hammer first to receive these.)
    Seeing both “versions” of the show is central to “a version’s” conceit. The exhibition plays with notions of doubling, mirroring, and continuation, with which co-curator Mackler has often experimented (at her alternative space Public Fiction, certain exhibitions would transform multiple times over their course).
    Fulton LeRoy Washington, aka Mr. Wash, Mondaine’s Market (2005). Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com.
    Sometimes, this works remarkably well. The Compton-based artist Fulton LeRoy Washington, aka Mr. Wash, couldn’t locate his 2005 painting Mondaine’s Market, when the biennial’s curators asked to include it. A portrait of a Kansas City grocery store, the painting includes two heads floating in the sky above—John L. Mondaine’s, the one-time owner of the store and a fellow inmate of Mr. Wash’s at the Florence Federal Correctional Institution in Colorado, and Mondaine’s grandson.
    Mr. Wash, whose lifetime sentence for a drug offense was commuted by President Obama in 2016, spent months looking for the painting, which he had shipped to Mondaine’s family from prison, and then, after the curators asked repeatedly, agreed to paint a replica. Before the show opened, he found Mondaine, who had the painting above his couch and agreed to lend it. The original hangs at the Hammer, while the replica, nearly twice the size but otherwise similar, hangs at the Huntington.
    Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, the input of this machine is the power an output contains (2021). Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com.
    Other successful doublings include Nicola L.’s work, her wall of wearable canvas bodies at the Huntington close enough to the Fur Room to recognize but so different in texture and resonance—the Huntington installation feels more like skin—that they invite a sensual experience all their own. Similarly, Jacqueline Kyomi Gork’s multi-room sound chamber on the Hammer’s balcony engulfs visitors in a slow experience, while her constantly inflating and deflating sculpture at the entrance to the Huntington installation is much more immediate.
    In some cases, however, the pairings don’t as effectively weather the 25 miles between the two institutions, and the multiple days (or weeks) between visits. For instance, Mario Ayala’s vivid, multi-layered acrylic-on-canvas montages of Latinx material culture at the Hammer are complimented at the Huntington by his source material: a collection of 1980s and ’90s zines, including issues of the cult-status Teen Angels, laid out in a vitrine. All of this is great to see, but it is hard to conjure Ayala’s virtuosic renderings clearly enough in the mind’s eye to enjoy all the resonances between them and the ephemera.
    Buck Ellison, Dick and Betsy, The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas, Texas, 1984 (2019). Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com.
    In the end, the Huntington, which has been working in recent years to examine its own white, wealthy history and collection, benefitted most from this cross-venue venture, and the decision to allow interplay between some biennial works and the permanent collection led to a few memorable contrasts: Umar Rashid’s epic paintings (based on subversive narratives of the colonial era that Rashid develops across his work) framing a view into the American decorative arts galleries; Buck Ellison’s uncomfortably well-composed photographic indictments of American elitism (filled with lacrosse shorts, tennis balls, and well-appointed interiors) hanging alongside John Singleton Copley’s The Western Brothers (1758). Yet these destabilizations of the Huntington’s legacy still manage to give its collection pride of place.
    Kahlil Joseph, BLKNWS® (2018–ongoing). Two-channel fugitive newscast. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hilltop Coffee +Kitchen, Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff McLane.

    Thankfully, two projects in the biennial ignore the restrictions and baggage of these institutions altogether—Larry Johnson’s pithy billboards installed citywide, like the sign on Rampart and Seventh that says “notary” and points down toward a notary’s office, and, more notably, Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS. The latter, produced in partnership with the non-profit Los Angeles Nomadic Division, has been screening across Los Angeles, primarily in Black-owned businesses in historically working-class neighborhoods, since November.
    It appears on two screens mounted high in Naturaliart Jamaican Restaurant in West Adams, and on two screens mounted on the wall in Hank’s Mini Market in South Central. The footage riffs on news show formats, mixing new footage with found clips, celebrating Black culture while excavating its media representation and reveling in the possibilities of video collage. It has been available all over, to anyone. Perhaps in future iterations there will be still more of this kind of site-specific, community-focused placement, and ideally even less focus on what is “Made in L.A.” (if the biennial even keeps that title). How and where the art is placed, and who it is for, is far more compelling.

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    in Street Art

    Roby Dwi Antono “Ranger Merah” Limited Edition Print – Available May 20th

    Indonesian artist Roby Dwi Antono have collaborated with ArtPort for his latest limited edition screenprint entitled “Ranger Merah”. In his print, a child with insidious eyes that somehow bleed innocence is portrayed with a dead dinosaur corpse behind her. She stands staring right back at the viewer, smugly wearing her prey’s head, holding the weapon with a sense of uncertainty washing over her face.Ranger Merah comes in an edition of 50 and measures 67 x 50 cm. The print is priced at 5,850 HK$.Ranger Merah will be available in May 20, 2020, Thursday 7PM HK Time (7AM NYC, 4AM LA, 9PM Melbourne, 12PM UK, 8PM Tokyo) at ArtPort website.Roby Dwi Antono is a visual artist mainly creating surrealistic paintings as well as sculptures and prints. His work opens a portal to another universe where spaceships, aliens, dinosaurs and creatures with humanly features come together. These surrealistic creations that once lived only in Dwi Antono’s imagination come to life in a new realm on his canvas.ArtPort is a publishing house established in 2020. ArtPort supplies limited high-quality editions and prints by artists from the new contemporary art wave. Created around the theme of travelling, ArtPort aims to have people on board, offering them a journey through the art world and an easy way to bring it to their homes. Each edition is a unique and exclusive collaboration between ArtPort and leading contemporary artists.Take a look below to view more photos of Ranger Merah screenprint. More

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    in Street Art

    “Revenge Body” by Emma Stern at Carl Kostyál Gallery, London

    Carl Kostyál London is proud to present Revenge Body, Emma Stern’s first solo show with the gallery. The exhibition is open from 13th May to 12th June 2021.Borrowing from the visual vocabulary of online niche subcultures such as fursonas, fandom and 3D erotica, Stern plays with the quasi-pornographic representation of women in the virtual world, combining traditional painterly techniques such as monochromatic underpainting and chiaroscuro with virtual 3D programmes and modelling to create eerily anonymous, finely-worked ‘portraits’, reclaiming these man-made avatars for the female domain.“What my work is most critical of is the inherent inclination toward pornographic (or at least porn-adjacent) representations of women throughout cyberspace. As our virtual selves become ever-more inextricable from our physical selves, I’m interested in how the preferences of the programmers are imposed on virtual female bodies within the largely male-dominated arena of software and technology.” – Emma Stern in conversation with Evan Malachosky, Cool Hunting, 2019.“There are recurring female archetypes that appear all throughout history but are especially pronounced in the world of 3d fandom and pornography: the cheerleader, the cowgirl, the pin-up girl, the bimbo, the secretary, the girl next door… and then when you start involving all these niche internet/gamer subcultures, you get these fantasy elements and wind up with the slutty elf, sexy centaur, the warrior princess and so on. All these characters are recognisable even if you’ve never seen them before, so they have their own narratives in a way, because they are archetypal.” –Emma Stern, De:Formal, 2020.Emma Stern (b. 1992) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute’s School of Painting. Her recent solo shows include ‘Slow Fade’, The Newsstand Project, Los Angeles (2020); ‘Works’, Jorge Andrew Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2017); ‘Tabs’, Stream Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2015). Stern has an upcoming solo show at Carl Kostyál, Stockholm in November 2021.Recent group shows include ‘Stockholm Sessions’, Carl Kostyál, Stockholm (2021); ‘Resting Point of Accommodation’, Almine Rech, Brussels (2021); ‘The Artist is Online’, Konig Gallery, Berlin (2021); ‘Friend Zone’, Half Gallery, New York (2021); ‘06’, PM/AM, London (2020); ‘Escapism’, Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York (2020) and ‘American Woman’, Allouche Benias Gallery, Athens, Greece (2020).Check out below for more images of “Revenge Body”Fiona, 2020. 3D printed PLA plastic, pearlescent acrylic enamel paint, clearcoat laquer.Erowid + Emily, 2020. Oil on canvas.Gabbi (Flexing) 2, 2020. Oil on canvas.Nina, 2020. Oil on canvas.Jess 2, 2020. Oil on canvas.Emily and Fiona 1, 2020. Oil on canvas. More