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1969 Gallery is proud to current Princess Botticelli, Emma Steinkraus’s first solo exhibition on the gallery. Steinkraus’s work is influenced by her analysis into artwork historical past, ladies’s historical past, and the wildlife of the Shenandoah Valley the place she lives. On this extremely multi-layered exhibition, she repurposes imagery from mythology, the Italian Renaissance and Romanticism to ask questions on femininity and humanity’s destruction of the biosphere.
Stylistically, Princess Botticelli presents the entire acquainted parts of a Steinkraus portray saturated colours, assured ladies, and ecologically-informed landscapes. Painted primarily in oil and acrylic, the work are intricately detailed. Steinkraus additionally takes time to contemplate the encircling area through which her works are introduced. In distinction to her earlier exhibition, Unattainable Backyard, the place the work have been displayed in opposition to a digitally-designed wallpaper depicting pictures made by pre-twentieth-century ladies artist-naturalists, the backdrop for these new work consists of towering pink archways, a playful nod to the structure of the Renaissance. This sensibility and a cheeky humorousness additionally inform most of the work, like Tick Examine, which encompasses a visible double entendre of a lady suggestively checking one other girl for ticks in entrance of a window overlooking a deer-spotted panorama. Different shocking, provocative moments seem in work comparable to The Harpy and The Minotaur, the place mythological tropes are reframed to problem the male gaze.
All through the exhibition, Steinkraus explores the fraught relationship between people and the nonhuman world. For instance, The Swan depicts a candy and sorrowful second between a lady and a swan who’ve discovered refuge in a river whereas the close by forest burns. This portray was initially influenced by the forest fires making headlines in 2020, and stays related as we witness the day by day results of local weather change right this moment. Equally, The Unicorn is an associative meditation on the anthropogenic pressures on the setting. Referencing the Unicorn Tapestries at The Met Cloisters, the physique of the hunted unicorn consists utilizing a photograph switch means of collaged pictures mimicking a number of web browser home windows. The pictures embody Caspar David Friedrich’s well-known Romantic-era portray Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which is recontextualized in order that its central determine surveys a contested panorama that features pictures of forest fires, falling glaciers, and screenshots from Twitter. Surrounding the unicorn are males with spears, standing in a grassy space full of most of the spring wildflowers from Steinkraus’s residence ecosystem.
Every of Steinkraus’s work are the results of a considerate exploration of her surrounding world. By means of a feminist lens, Steinkraus expertly challenges artwork historic norms, posing questions on sexuality, humanity, and the more-than-human world.
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