JARILAGER Gallery is happy to present Bruised dawn, a solo exhibition featuring new paintings from British artist Galina Munroe. Munroe's large canvases blend oil painting and collage, figuration and abstraction, simplifying floral arrangements, wine bottles and other everyday objects into playful, childlike shapes and vibrant colours. These floral still lifes are delicate symbols of her tending to 'her inner garden', as well as an artistic means to rebel against the age-old aesthetic hierarchy that privileges certain forms of art over others based on biased gender pertains.
Flowers have historically been considered a very suitable subject for women with artistic aspirations. After all, plants and flowers could be found in the women's immediate surroundings, not far from home–relatively safe and frivolous subject matter. For their association with surreptitious attributes of femininity and the domestic sphere, flowers stood as the stronghold of a prejudiced devaluation of women's work in art. As Munroe likes to point out, 'it was generally agreed that the prestigious genre of history painting was inadequate for women, who it was thought lacked the knowledge and strength of imagination needed to paint high-ranking biblical or mythological scenes. Moreover, for a history painter, knowledge of the human anatomy was indispensable, but it was considered inappropriate for women to study human anatomy by drawing from a nude model'.
According to Eli Zaretsky, a Marxist historian writing in the 1970s, feminism aspires to 'revolutionise the deepest and most universal aspects of life—those of personal relations, love, egotism, sexuality, and our inner emotional lives'. Art categories are no small matter in this sense. It seems clear that feminine art history has made enormous gains in the academy: we have recovered scores of women artists from oblivion and entered them into the canon. But is this enough_?_ Is it a revolution of the deepest order to insert women's art back into rooms that have been structured by their very depreciation?
With their emphasis on recurring floral shapes, precise movement and opaque patches of colour, Munroe's paintings allow us to imagine different genealogies and hence different versions of how we tell the history of art made by women, as well as art made under the influence of feminism. Her Bruised dawn is not a broken story repaired by insisting that women shall occupy their rightful places in the grand narrative of white-male painters who did not include them. On the contrary, it's an invitation to stand in the gap—in the 'bruises'—and take it as the very condition under which the work of women artists shall be both produced and re-imagined. By intentionally mocking the division between serious and frivolous, Munroe's still lifes aim to resurrect the subversive potential of women's craft and decorative art, as a way to make space for and elevate a different kind of life for women.
Beside her feminist engagement, Munroe is a mostly sensitive human being dealing with the scars and issues of a womanhood that she can't find a manual for, especially when it comes to motherhood and coming of age. Painting is for her a form of personal nurture and a safe place where to experiment with the things that she, as a woman, would love to nurture. Flowers help her through the secret language of reproduction, birth and natural flows, hence giving her the chance to get closer to her female body, with the ubiquitous and mysterious processes that underlie it, and to heal it from its traumas. By offering us flowers, she lets us into the herbarium of her bruises, hopes and affections. Some of them are thoughtful gifts from the hand of her therapist, that she doesn't want to forget about. Some others are members of her family and her beloved brothers.
Looking at Munroe's paintings feels like witnessing a therapeutical journey made of little gestures of compassion and love. Learning to be more compassionate with ourselves, exploring boundaries and vulnerabilities of our organic nature: this might be the way to speak as and for women artists, that incorporates the bruises and challenges of the dawn to come.
Press release courtesy JARILAGER Gallery.
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