Katherine Sherwood
Blind Venus
75” x 80”
Mixed media on found linen. 2017-2018
Courtesy of the artist and Walter Maciel Gallery, LA, CA
SOLD
Website: http://www.katherinesherwood.com/
California, USA
Image by Katherine Sherwood
Audio by Mari Weiss
75” x 80”
Mixed media on found linen. 2017-2018
Courtesy of the artist and Walter Maciel Gallery, LA, CA
SOLD
Website: http://www.katherinesherwood.com/
California, USA
Image by Katherine Sherwood
Audio by Mari Weiss
ABOUT THE ARTWORK:
I have been working on a new series of large-scale paintings featuring disabled reclining female nudes that reference medical imagery and disability. I am calling this series Venuses of the Yelling Clinic as I have appropriated art-historical images of the female nude in order to challenge canonical ideals of beauty.
These Venuses are painted on the linen backs of Art History reproductions made in 1950-60’s that are tiled together with linen strips glued to the front side to create a large quilted linen painting surface. The images are canonical, primarily Western paintings and drawings that were used as educational tools. They are reinforced on the reverse with linen backing so that they would be more durable. The linen backs are quite beautiful; they have handwritten labels with the artists’ names and catalogue numbers and they are worn, a bit yellowed, and show evidence of repeated use.
This is the fifth painting in my Venus series. It is based on Titian’s painting Venus of Urbino.
In my version a blind disabled woman with brain scans for a head lies nude on opulent fabrics with her probing cane.
-Katherine Sherwood
These Venuses are painted on the linen backs of Art History reproductions made in 1950-60’s that are tiled together with linen strips glued to the front side to create a large quilted linen painting surface. The images are canonical, primarily Western paintings and drawings that were used as educational tools. They are reinforced on the reverse with linen backing so that they would be more durable. The linen backs are quite beautiful; they have handwritten labels with the artists’ names and catalogue numbers and they are worn, a bit yellowed, and show evidence of repeated use.
This is the fifth painting in my Venus series. It is based on Titian’s painting Venus of Urbino.
In my version a blind disabled woman with brain scans for a head lies nude on opulent fabrics with her probing cane.
-Katherine Sherwood
DESCRIPTION:
In this double bed sized work, Venus has mustard yellow skin with red outlines. She reclines on a red couch, propped on fat white pillows her feet on the right. A small brown and white dog sleeps by her feet. Her hair is a helmet of brown and black acorn shapes topped by small bells. A smaller version of the brown and black shapes rests on her shoulders. Her face is pear shaped, with a fleshy center resembling a curled tongue above two kidney shapes and a long narrow opening filled with a device with hooks. The arm closest to us is bent and rests on a pillow. In her hand are red flowers. A narrow brown bracelet is on her wrist. The curved fingers of her other hand rest between her legs. A ring is on the pinky finger of this hand. Lying beside her left leg is a red and white cane. She rests on a geometric pattern in yellow and black. The background above her is white and off-white with faint lines recreating a rectangular grid. The rectangles are labeled with famous artist names in addition to numbers and letters: Paul Nash, Renoir, J.C. Copley, Van De Weyden, Turner, Pascin, Signac, Francesca, Durer, Titian, Monet, and Toulouse Lautrec.
-description by Teri Grossman
-description by Teri Grossman
Opulent Mobility by A. Laura Brody is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
The Opulent Mobility license refers to the exhibit and its audio descriptions. Individual artworks are the property of the individual artists.