She She is Rebecca Warren's fourth solo exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler.
Consisting of a group of life-size, hand-painted bronze female figures – nude or partially clothed – these new works operate along a scale of fleshy realism at one end, to anatomical waywardness and extreme surface turbulence at the other. Deviations from the norms of anatomy include supernumerary limbs, rampantly burgeoned hands, and strange outgrowths that might be outlandish hairdos or unexpected handles. Additionally the paintwork by turns emphasises and blurs distinctions between flesh and clothes, or suggests other kinds of ornamental surfaces.
This group of sculptures recalls an earlier group that Warren produced in 2003, for which she gained wide notice. Collectively titled SHE, that exhibition similarly consisted of several life-size female figures – though made in unpainted, unfired clay – with their anatomies pushed to extremes of comic and bathetic implausibility.
Her new work revisits and develops these ideas, narrowing and refining the differences between natural forms and postures, and the deformations and exaggerations towards which they might be pushed. The drive is to produce strange and unique beings with particular kinds of presences and purposes. Warren says of these variations that 'they are in search of human mood, and the uncanny lifelikeness and humanity that survives even when the sculptures are pushed into weird abstraction' and that 'it's tricky to be serious about art, to not automatically go for the easy answer. Art should be exposing, seriously worrying to get right – it's there that the genuinely moving can occur, and the genuinely funny if it needs to.'
Press release courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler.
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