Recalling the work of Matisse, Picasso, and Modigliani, New York-based artist Danielle Orchard's nudes generate art historical and contemporary familiarity. Exploring female representation, her paintings infuse currents of 20th-century modernist painting with contemporary narratives.
Read MoreBorn in Michigan City, Orchard studied painting at Indiana University, completing a BFA in 2009. In 2013 she completed an MFA at Hunter College, New York. During her studies, her artistic interests were nurtured by field trips to Europe. The artist now lives and works in Brooklyn.
Danielle Orchard's paintings reference the works of classic modernists in subject and style. Lounging semi-abstract female nudes are presented in a style that renders forms from multiple perspectives, using solid lines and flattened planes of saturated colour. Yet Orchard's women are also contemporary, as shown by their surroundings, subtly critiquing the male gaze of her 20th-century predecessors.
In paintings like Rejection Season (2017) and Muses (2017), Picasso's typical muses seemingly come to life in the modern age. Orchard's paintings present women together and alone engaged in activities such as bathing, lounging on beds and on the grass, relaxing after tennis, or drinking and smoking. Often undressed, their nudity evokes the timelessness of classical nudes, while the settings they inhabit and the surrounding objects ground the sitters in the contemporary.
While objects like an empty wine glass, a phone off the hook, or a birthday cake make hints at contemporary narratives, for Orchard an interest in colour and light guides her work more than telling a story. Rendered in bold and painterly brush strokes, her colour choices create atmospheres of calm and lethargy.
Rejection Season's warm palette of purple, muted pinks, and blues conveys a gentle calm as the light of early dusk softly washes over the nude figure in the bathtub. One can sense a moment of release and relief as the sitter lets go and escapes the pain of rejection for a moment.
A subject spanning several works, Orchard's interest in women playing sports is in relation to projections of male desire onto women in sports. Her tennis paintings were created around the time Serena Williams made headlines for refusing to wear outfits deemed 'appropriate' by male officials.
In Tennis Lesson (2018), two female players recline on the court with post-match beers. Their revealing white tennis clothes, next to the deep green of the tennis court, generates instant associations with the game and its gendered disparities. In an interview with Juxtapoz Magazine, Orchard says, 'I was really into the outfits and how they're a perfect example of women's bodies being policed by men—even while we're playing sports.'
Expanding on her use of line and colour, Orchard produced a series of lithograph prints during her 2019 residency at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque. A mixture of still life, portraiture, and nude bathers, Orchard's prints place greater primacy on linear form with a sparing, monochromatic use of colour.
Also produced during her lithography residency was Blue Bather (2019), a print that makes subtle allusion to the style of Matisse. A bathing female and her surroundings are rendered singularly in gradations of blue and grey. Much like the other bathers in Orchard's paintings, the subject lounges unperturbed by the viewer's gaze, serenely absorbed in the moment.
Rather than performing activities for the benefit of the intruding male gaze, Orchard's female sitters occupy a state of bliss, at ease with their oft-naked bodies and completely absorbed in their private worlds, unconcerned by who might be looking.
In Beach Read (2021), a woman lounging on the beach appears detached from her performative role in the scene as she faces away from the viewer out to the sea, an open book lying face down on a picnic blanket. Looking beyond the form of the subject, the viewer is invited but to recognise their interiority, internal thought process, and muted emotions. Orchard explains her painted moments are 'familiar rituals that look very serene ... but when you're a woman who has experienced them, you know that there's usually a lot going on.'
Danielle Orchard's art has been the subject of both solo exhibition and group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions include At the Seams, Perrotin, Seoul (2021); Mother's Magazines, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York (2020); 3PM, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen (2019); and A Little Louder, Love, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York (2018).
Group exhibitions include Fantasy Body, Projet Pangée, Montreal (2021); Eros Unlimited, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen (2020); Five Propositions, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (2018); BODY/HEAD, Field Projects Pop Up, Be Fluent, New York (2017); AWKWARD, Kers Gallery, Amsterdam (2015); and Residents Exhibition, Dedalus Foundation Gallery, Brooklyn (2014).
Danielle Orchard's Instagram can be found here, and her website can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2021
