Paulina Olowska - Seduction - 2017
This edition is a giclée print of a woman lifting her white T-shirt to expose her breasts. The image is taken from a film still from Every Man for Himself by Jean-Luc Godard, and a photography of Ulrike Ottinger, Absinth (Tabea Blumenschein).
The idea of this work is to reveal how women show their breasts as a method to get what they want. Showing one’s breasts can be seen as an act of prostitution and a shortcut for the female artist. Could we say that art made by women is a form of prostitution? This woman in the photograph, for me, resembles the young Alina Szapocznikow. I was thinking of Alina while creating a collage for her first major survey of work in the UK at the Hepworth Wakefield gallery. The collage relates to my search for the active female muse, a punk. It is not only the muse who inspires, but who takes the lead and controls it—sometimes as a last resort by lifting her shirt. Women like Ulrike Ottinger, Emmy Hennings, Pauline Boty, or Alina Szapocznikow become, for me, role models in a powerful position for maneuvering through male society using forms of seduction as one of the tools to achieve what they want. Seduction is a way of storytelling.
Medium: Giclée print
Size: 29,7 x 45 cm
Edition of 25 + 5 AP
Signed and numbered
Price: €800
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster - Marlene & Franz - 2017
This edition consists of two photographs formatted as postcards. Each one is signed on the back in the style of prewar-cinema photographic studio portraits. For a number of years now, DGF has been working on realizing “apparitions” of literary and cinematic icons by transforming herself into these characters. This seems to have first taken place after an encounter by the artist with the writer Enrique Vila-Matas, who in one of his books, Dublinesca, transformed her into a fictional character.
At a conference at the Collège de France in 2017, the artist appeared, leaning over an amphitheater balcony, dressed as Franz Kafka; she then reappeared as Marlene Dietrich, accompanied by a song from the actress. In both apparitions she wears men’s suits, an allusion to a reader of Roberto Bolaño, who, according to Vila-Matas, wrote on her blog that “there is not one night where the vermin do not change and each time Kafka reminds us: a different transformation, a different woman. Yesterday he became Marlene Dietrich.” The transformation of Kafka into Dietrich is summoned here between the writer and the artist, and now, in these photographs by the artist, made into an edition.
Medium: Two color prints
Size: 19 x 15 cm,
in collaboration with Giasco Bertoli
Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Signed and numbered
Price: €800
Both fundraising editions are available at May Editions
