Elsie Kagan - pretender (Flashe on wood panel, 5" x 5", 2020)
My work is grounded equally in the history of representative painting and in contemporary concerns with materiality. I take as a launching point a historical genre - Baroque images of a mother and child, or the humble still life - and reinterpret the genre’s language to probe its enduring resonance. How do its conceptual underpinnings and formal conventions relate to contemporary concerns and strategies of representation? How is it mine? My pictures depict the ambivalence of motherhood alongside the material fact of a brushstroke; that charged moment when paint is both a smear and a set of eyes looking out.
My work is grounded equally in the history of representative painting and in contemporary concerns with materiality. I take as a launching point a historical genre - Baroque images of a mother and child, or the humble still life - and reinterpret the genre’s language to probe its enduring resonance. How do its conceptual underpinnings and formal conventions relate to contemporary concerns and strategies of representation? How is it mine? My pictures depict the ambivalence of motherhood alongside the material fact of a brushstroke; that charged moment when paint is both a smear and a set of eyes looking out.
My work is grounded equally in the history of representative painting and in contemporary concerns with materiality. I take as a launching point a historical genre - Baroque images of a mother and child, or the humble still life - and reinterpret the genre’s language to probe its enduring resonance. How do its conceptual underpinnings and formal conventions relate to contemporary concerns and strategies of representation? How is it mine? My pictures depict the ambivalence of motherhood alongside the material fact of a brushstroke; that charged moment when paint is both a smear and a set of eyes looking out.