winsor gallery

ANGELA GROSSMANN

The Future is Female Girl Leaning Black Bra, Blue Background Two Flowers Black, White and Blue Wounded Bird Blue Gloves, Red Hair Tiny Girl with Cobalt Blue Hair Red Yellow and Blue Rose Madder and White Cool Grey Dress

Throughout history, the female form has embodied the tastes and conventions of culture, from ancient fertility symbols to today’s chop-shop cosmetic surgery modifications. Perhaps now, more than ever, we’re inundated with idealized images of the female body that challenge female autonomy, liberty and choice. The Future is Female attempts to cut through the clutter of live-out-loud social media, closed-circuit surveillance, sensationalized bullying, fetishisation of youth and sexualisation of girls via the mainstreaming of pornography and consumer trends. Grossmann’s intimate portraits speak to the female struggle for identity, security, self-acceptance and empowerment in the face of homogenous and new-fangled dictates of appearance and behaviour.

“We live in an age where every moment from the age of two onwards, children, women especially, are constantly aware of being looked at, photographed or being captured somehow for future reference,” acknowledges Grossmann of the chronic weighing up process, the anxiety about whether they’re good enough, slim enough, wearing the right clothes, portraying the right image. “I’m interested in those chance moments when a woman or girl takes on a power beyond all of that rubbish, beyond herself,” she says. “It might be the swing of a hip or the way a leg stands that is so beautiful, so extraordinary, has always been extraordinary and appealing. I’m not interested in making a statement, in being didactic. I’m just trying to figure it out: why is that so captivating, so beautiful? I’m going after beauty. Not in the classic sense, but in the poignant fleeting moments, like the girl in tight jeans with a broken zipper. These moments when we’re vulnerable without pretense, caught unawares, are sometimes the most poetic. Even when we’re trying to be something else, it’s what we’re not trying to be that’s actually so exquisite. We don’t know it at the time. We can’t know it. If we did, it wouldn’t be exquisite.”

The painting collages and paintings on paper in this exhibition tackle this conundrum head-on, but Grossmann’s inventions aren’t tragic victims caught between a rock and a hard place. “I’m really trying to say what wonderful, powerful, gorgeous, extraordinary sensual beings we are and that there are so many ways to be fantastic and glorious without having to compromise ourselves by shaving off all our pubic hair and binding ourselves into ridiculous clothes. How do we absorb and represent these pressures and form identity beyond the codes of behaviour? How we come by our sexuality? How do you come to terms with being watched and judged and ranked all the time? These works are very much about discussing these very unpleasant ways we’re meant to address being watched and objectified.”

The girls and women that populate The Future is Female literally embody this complex terrain, re-imagined through Grossmann’s visceral production methods. The paintings on paper are of female silhouettes executed alla prima in vibrant pinks and magentas. The collage paintings are drawn from the thousands of photographs, snapshots and images Grossmann has salvaged and collected for more than two decades. The act of re-creating the female form using these found materials is not just about finding and salvaging historic artefacts from obscurity, but also charging them with new life and purpose; to render the fleeting, anonymous moments in time familiar and timeless. The process starts with digging through her archive to locate specific images, gestures or textures. These images are then photocopied, scaled up and then ripped or torn into pieces to assemble a new figure, often using images that juxtapose and contrast with each other, such as using the back of a head to represent the front of a head, or using male body parts to represent a female. “These are my raw materials and so is the tape, the glue, the act of scraping and scratching away at the image,” she says. “Push-pins become a drawing tool, a sort of pencil; I will scrape off parts I don’t like. I go into it over and over and over again, adding and subtracting until I get what it is I’m after. Then I paint and draw on the image, adding colour with traditional tools. It’s a slow, wrestling process, using bits and pieces of different things that don’t work together, making things that don’t fit fit. I’m not interested in making anything titillating or even beautiful necessarily in a classic sense—it’s complicated beauty. There’s a psychological moment when I know I’ve found what I’m after, a character. But you can’t pin it down completely.”

Written by Danielle Egan, February 2012

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