By Sharon Fuller
If the faces in the previous work of Angela Grossmann appeared
to avoid the viewer’s gaze — either because in profile,
or of the marginalised whose best attempt in the face of scrutiny
is to look out with apprehension — this is certainly not
so in her most recent work. Here they look back.
The figures — predominantly of young women — that
made up Grossmann’s most recent body of work, Looking
Back, do so unabashedly, and with a confidence not often encountered
in contemporary renditions of the female form, especially where
the figures are unclothed. With this new body of work, Vancouver-based,
British-born Grossmann, too, looks back, exhibiting an assurance
congruous with the figures she portrays as she looks afresh
at the female body, pushing to uncover an invigorated female
sexuality and inviting us to do likewise.
Grossmann, who came to Canada in the mid-1970s, recently returned
to Vancouver, the city in which she found fame in 1985 as one
of the eight Young Romantics, after living, working and studying
in Paris, Amsterdam and Montreal. She now has her studio in
Gastown, Vancouver's oldest site and teaches at the city's Emily
Carr Institute of Art and Design, the institution from which
she, as one of the Young Romantics, was launched on to the international
stage along with Attila Richard Lukacs, (Ricky to his friends)
Graham Gilmore, Derek Root, Vicky Marshall, Charles Rea, Philippe
Raphanel and Mina Totino.
The young women depicted in Looking Back have come of age as
Grossmann, at 46, has come of age, and as contemporary womanhood
has come of age. All three now seem to recognise that the time
for looking down, often with embarrassment, is gone. The self-effacing
disposition has disappeared; the shying away is in the past;
earlier anxieties have been banished. For Grossmann this stance
of looking back may be new, but it has been in the making a
long time, waiting to peer out since perhaps her art school
days at Emily Carr in the early 1980s. She remembers producing
a small piece about a decade ago of an unclothed woman that
she then discounted as being not possible to do, putting it
away, as she knew she was not yet prepared to go down that path.
She never showed it to anyone, never sold it; “loving
the work”, but not then entirely knowing what it meant,
she felt that she, and others, were not yet ready for it. The
time was not right then — sensibilities were guarded,
curators cautious and depictions of the naked female form all
too often controversial and frequently frowned upon.
Grossmann still has this work — and others in which she
finds she followed a similar impulse to render women unashamed
of being themselves, in whatever circumstances they find themselves,
no matter what. She has only recently come to fully appreciate
these works and what it is that she was attempting to do then
with these renditions, and this appreciation she now finds in
the context of her new body of work, Looking Back, recently
exhibited at the Diane Farris Gallery in Vancouver, which represents
her.Grossmann is now ready.
She is joyous about these new female forms which are her creations,
as she is with the fact that she too can now look back, with
new eyes, unafraid, as are the young women she has produced.
This newly found confidence is one Grossmann shares with contemporary
women. Indeed, there is something else at work beside her own
creative subjectivity. She is keying into something larger —
a phenomenon far bigger than Grossmann as lone woman artist
working in the 21st century. Like the women rendered in the
work, the contemporary woman has also found an unfamiliar assurance
— looking back at the promiscuously desirous male gaze
and the censorial stare alike, always unashamed, in whatever
situation, and certainly on her own terms; facing the look,
from whichever camp it comes.
Gallerist Diane Farris sees these new works of Grossmann’s
as “women being comfortable with their bodies.”
She says they represent “the end of political correctness
about women painting women in the nude.” Audiences who
came to the show — which ran at the Diane Farris Gallery
through November, 2000 — indicated by their presence and
notice that their conclusion was the same. The gallery was thronged
with viewers, sales of the pieces significant and the collectors
who bought them were made up of a diverse cross-section of collectors;
men and women, couples, the younger and older.
Thus, the viewers of these works took up Grossmann’s invite,
looking at the 17 bold figures and uncovering along with her
an invigorated female sexuality that has been arrived at after
almost a century of struggle, with a triumph that has increasingly
come to include, rather than exclude, and one that talks to
both women and men. This assured joyousness now evident in both
the work and the artist translates into a working that comes
quickly now that Grossmann has arrived in this previously unused
place. This swiftness of work is part consequence of, firstly,
almost two decades of art-making, secondly, at least a decade
of living with and giving form to the long-held and cherished
ideas with which she is now working, and finally of her newly
acquired modest confidence.
Artists are often plagued with doubts, fears, anxieties. Is
this an authentic rendering? Does it ring true? Does it work?
But with these works, there was an immediate knowledge. Grossmann
feels they are right – for themselves, for their time
and for her.
This body of work was developed fairly rapidly over a period
of about six months ahead of the November 2000 Vancouver opening.
With these works Grossmann starts head-first. By carefully sifting
through many, many, images she finds faces with the look —
unabashed, assured, unashamed. Indeed, these faces have the
opposite expressions to those in her previous body of work on
criminals — where the faces did not appear to look back
— and which she developed over a period from 1996 to 1999.
In contrast, there the faces were shamed, bereft, isolated,
with eyes that look out, and with much apprehension. With this
current series, once she has found the image of the face she
feels is true to her current vision, Grossmann then creates
the body that is veracious to it, thus bringing these two aspects
of femaleness together, joining the found head and the created
body. She marries what she does — painting — with
what the faces she has found are, or, in other words, she collaborates
with her “photographic subjects”.
They are not just any face. There is always a conversation between
her and those in the photograph. She draws on faces from another
time, a previous time, using faces that are not current so as
to warn her viewers not to take these images too literally,
reminding them that it is within metaphor that she is working.
These self-assured, self-confident women who stare back at us,
which have only now become possible for Grossmann to create,
are nevertheless still fantasy.
She has used old photographs before in previous bodies of work.
In a 1992 artist's statement, Grossmann described this process
as “using a mixture of their time and current techniques”
to bring the faces into her time. “I re-interpret using
collage, painting, drawing, cut/paste, revising their gender,
social status, religion until they are unidentifiable, mysterious
and unknowable. They still refer to the past although exactly
when, where and who they are is no longer decipherable or even
particularly important”.
In this series Grossmann joins together two ways of working.
During her years as a student, and immediately following her
graduation in 1985, the works were large, figurative and explosive.
Some years later in Amsterdam, when she was pregnant with her
son Sebastiaan and no longer able to work with large canvasses,
Grossmann turned to working at a far smaller scale, often using
found photographs, carefully selected, which she then made her
own within the work she produced. She moved from the massive
— climbing up on chairs to paint — to the miniature
— with her face on the table. In this body of work the
canvasses — mostly old tarpaulins, kitbags and torn-apart
tents — are large; the carefully selected photographs
are still there, but now they are joined to the expansive figures.
Between these two periods, Grossmann worked in Paris on a Canada
Council Studio award, undertook and obtained an MFA at Concordia
in 1991 and taught painting at Ottawa University from 1991 to
1993. Even though it has been over 16 years since she was a
student at Emily Carr, she remains close to those who became
known as Vancouver's Group of Five -- which include Lukacs,
Gilmore, Root and Douglas Coupland and has works by all four
are in her home which, located in downtown Vancouver, is within
walking distance of Emily Carr. Coupland, who coined the term
Generation X, was not part of the Young Romantics, but he was
also at Emily Carr and a close friend during those years and,
while his fame has largely been associated with writing rather
than painting, he has returned to sculpture with a May exhibition
at Monte Clark Gallery, the Vancouver gallery which also represents
Gilmore and Root.
The five have collaborated on a print series, the proceeds of
which will go into the 85-5 Visual Arts Foundation Scholarship,
established last year to provide scholarships for students studying
at their alma mater. As varied and international as her academic
career has been are her exhibition locations, which have included
Paris, London, Amsterdam, Cologne, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles,
and San Francisco. With this new body of work, Grossmann is
again looking out.
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