Artist´s Hand, 2021
50 x 50 cm, Collage and Mixed Media on board
The artwork Artist´s Hand is made by collage with layers of used cotton bedsheet and Fine Art c-print of two details of paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Slave Market, 1866 and The Artist and his Model, 1895.
Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 – 1904) was a French orientalist painter, who is considered as one of the most important painters of academic period of 1880. He combined accurate Middle Eastern Architectural details with idealized female nudes in his Paris studio.
Slave Market depicts a fantasy scene imagined by the artist, of Arabic (Middle Eastern) men checking the teeth of a naked woman with a finger, for the purpose of deciding whether to buy her as a slave. 2019 the AfD party used Slave Market in a campaign poster.
The Artist and his Model depicts Gérôme in his Studio. He is working on the sculpture of a naked woman using a nude model. The depiction is hyper realistic and the artist is working on the legs of the sculpture using his hands and a tool.
Artist´s Hand interrogates the colonialist point of view of orientalist art, and its use of the female body as a subject of free sexual fantasy. I use textile in my work as a medium for covering or exposing. White cotton of a used bedsheet is connected with the topics of colonial economy and labour and at the same time, lies in intimate proximity to the human skin and body. With the combination of the hand of the painter and the hand of slave merchant, I ask how the artist’s staging of the female nude presents a dialectical contrast between fantasy and documentation.
