Whatiftheworld / gallery

Debut Solo Exhibition

04 - 27 September 2008

OPENING: Thursday 04 September 2008 18h00 - 21h00

Georgina Gratrix presents her first solo offering, ‘Master Copy’ at Whatiftheworld / Gallery. Exploring the traditions, techniques and histories of painting, Gratrix flattens ‘Old Masters’, remixes classics and samples Modernisms in this bold exhibition that explores just what painting means within contemporary popular culture.

Taking her own position as a young female painter within the concept-driven contemporary art world, Gratrix plays with stereotypes of gender, youth and conceptualism - to make an intelligent, teasing and visually stimulating exhibition using media that range from oil paint to pencil crayon to mono prints, with sincere and fun explorations of each medium’s use and tradition.

On entering the gallery housing Georgina Gratrix’s Master Copy we are faced with two iconic figures that frame the artist’s current production. On the left handside we have a stripe painting - reminiscent of ‘Biggie Best’ furnishings, corporate wallpaper and cool-kid easy abstraction t-shirts, on the right, a colossal painted woman towers over us.

Though seemingly benign and easy to look at, the colours in this stripe painting present a problem. Disjunctive flesh tones and bruise-coloured blues would (perhaps) be difficult to match with the average couch. This disquieting palette, though, is the core of this work. A third of the Women Wallpaper series, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a stripe painting using the now sacred palette of Pablo Picasso’s ‘masterpiece’ of the same name - a violent fracturing of the illusionist painting tradition, and of the female subjects he depicts (who were famously prostitutes, women paid for their nakedness).

Alongside Les Demoiselles d’Avignon we see Show Me Your Dancing, a giant pieced-together woman facing her (rather pathetically endowed) lover, Show Me Your Feelings, across the room. This towering woman, with her sublime inverted-mountain-vagina looks longingly over the rest of the show - a naked triumph of figurative painting who has escaped the confines of the controlling frame of the nude.

Both paintings of women, and both partly about the representation of women within the Western painting tradition, these works are also about the notion of representation itself - a flattening of the (already flattened by Cubism) figurative master and a challenge to the tradition of the flat painted canvas. These tensions, between figuration and representation, copy and original, play and seriousness, surface and paint and showing and telling are evident throughout Gratrix’s body of work.

On one hand a day-glo text piece, Woman, intertwines ‘Brenda’ (Fassie) and ‘Le Tigre’ with ‘Dolly’ (Parton), ‘Amy’ (Winehouse), ‘woman’ and ‘grrr’ in what appears to be a completed crossword puzzle. On the other side of the gallery tracks by Le Tigre (an hardcore feminist electro group) battle it out with a Brenda Fassie number in Mix Tape, where pop songs are represented by multi-coloured doodles drawn with an oversized rainbow pencil crayon, twirling through colours as the artist imagines her favourite songs of the moment in a re-imagining of Cy Twombly’s iconic Modernist abstracts.

Master Copy suggests quite literally a copy of a ‘master’, the term applied throughout the history of painting to an elite group of supposed male genii whose work is never anything less than deadly serious. At the same time the phrase negates itself, as the master copy (of a film, piece of music etc.) is the original copy, imbued with all the specialness that originality implies. Gratrix’s debut solo exhibition is a mash-up of contemporary popular culture, abstract idealism and personal expression, taking her position firmly as a woman painter of modern life.

By Linda Stupart

Click here to read a review of the exhibition on ArtThrob