Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham 31 October – 14 January
Reviewed by: Nick Lambrianou
Allegory – the once widely understood language of objects and stories which have a meaning other than their surface appearance – has long been relegated by modern art practices such as abstraction to literature alone. That it has made a comeback in visual art recently may be due to the re-emergence of realism and narrative in a variety of more or less ironic manifestations: most famously Pop Art but also in the revival of certain painterly forms which fell outside the dominant western tradition.
It is apt then that Merseyside-based artists the Singh twins have been asked by the Barber Institute to create some work in response to their exhibition 'The Blue Bower: Rossetti in the 1860s'. This show contextualises perhaps one of the most famous of all Rossetti images – the portrait of Fanny Cornforth made in 1865. Amrit and Rabinda Singh create immaculately detailed paintings that consciously evoke seventeenth century Indian miniature painting, but address modern concerns such as multiculturalism, politics and the contemporary art world itself. They aim to revive a tradition of unashamedly colourful and allegorical image making that manages to be at once realistic and decorative. It is precisely these qualities which connect the Indian forms and the Pre-Raphaelite's representation of femininity as an aesthetic – even quasi-religious – ideal.
It is a modern, more complicated idea of femininity that is of concern here. The Singh twins have created a series of tiny paintings, collectively entitled 'Rethinking Rossetti: Facets of Femininity'. These borrow the iconography of The Blue Bower but marry it with the lush, intensively decorative flatness of their own work. In each they replace the original 'stunner' with eight famous women from the twentieth century: Princess Diana, Mother Theresa, Eva Peron, Margaret Thatcher, Maria Callas, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna and Geri Halliwell. The transposition provokes some important questions – predominantly on the radically developed representation of womanhood since Rossetti's time. These women are all famous for their actions and not merely for their beauty. Furthermore each woman is different, so unique in her lifestyle and ambitions, that the very notion of a feminine 'ideal' becomes obsolete.
Rossetti repeatedly employed the same allegorical forms in his paintings (flowers, musical instruments), whilst the Singh twins squeeze in a wide variety of symbolic props so that each image becomes a sort of picture-puzzle of each woman's celebrity. These ciphers range from the obscure (Marilyn Monroe holding Aphrodite's magic girdle) to the subtle (Mother Theresa's pelican, the Christian symbol of self-sacrifice) to the somewhat literal (Princess Diana gripping a chess piece – the white queen naturally). Even though allegory has been rediscovered by yet another generation of artists, it appears that its use is best employed with a healthy amount of irony.
Writer detail:
NICK LAMBRIANOU
IS AN ARTIST AND WRITER.
Venue detail:
No one has commented on this article yet, why not be the first?
To post a comment you need to login
Back to top