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Stella Vine at The Museum of New Art
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Stella Vine, Pete.
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Detroit - The
Museum of New Art (MONA) is proud to present Stella Vine -
Bluebells, Hollyhocks and Honesty opening September 15 through
October 28. The English painter Stella Vine creates her paintings with
just the bare minimum required to give the works something like space
extending from the picture plane, forestalling vertigo. The
sensationalism of the images' content sometimes obscures the real joy
in the work, but with a list of subjects that careens from Jean
Harlowe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Frida Kahlo, Sid and Nancy, and
Princess Diana to the artist's relatives, it's hard not to look for
meaning.
'When Charles Saatchi purchased her painting of Diana, Princess of
Wales, Stella Vine was propelled into the centre of a media frenzy and
aspects of her life story were filtered through that particularly
English kaleidoscope that is tabloid tale telling. Somehow in all this
temporary fiction, in the whole hoopla of burlesque outrage, the main
point got lost - the work itself.
Stella Vine is a contemporary figurative painter, a tightropey place
to be at present. Her paintings, however, far from being stuck in some
kind of revisionist retreading, trace a radical trajectory that
connects the Rococo lyricism of Gainsborough to the Kitchen Sink
storytelling of John Bratby, arriving at a modern gothic soup of Dark
Romanticism where it is possible to discern the artist thinking with
her brush.
Vine's darkling theatre of identification, re-defines a contemporary
axis of representation where the melancholic gravitas of the work is
often balanced by deft touches of black humour. After the recent
intense media scrutiny of her private life, Stella has spent time
making new work, retreating into a fictive world “like a lost girl...
a deranged teenager trying to make an environment of loves, memories
and desires”.
Not unlike the songs of P.J Harvey, which “dramatise the conflicts of
desiring and being desired”, Vine explores “a kind of self exposure
that uniquely combines seduction and threat, intimacy and
estrangement”. - Alex Michon.
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