Converging Territories #30 (2004) shows different generations of women and girls and their differentiated relationship with the display of their physical attributes. In Les Femmes du Maroc: Fumée d’Ambre Gris (2008), the protagonist looks like a priestess or new Circe inspired by John William Waterhouse’s brush.
The women wear robes matching their surroundings-as if they are props or accessories to enhance a scene. These tableaux place women at the center of our present gaze, overlaying the weight of an intrusive past. The prints pay homage to portraiture, except for one still life, in soft, desaturated sepia hues, and more graphic composition playing on traditional Islamic tile patterns, such as in Harem #14B (2009), and colorful interiors, in Harem Revisited #59 (2013) and Harem Revisited #33 (2012).
In her body of work, Essaydi (b.1956) seeks to subvert 19th-century Orientalist visual tropes in 14 chromogenic prints. Lalla Essaydi’s “A New Gaze,” on show at Edwynn Houk gallery, also ambitions to break away from externally-imposed constraints. Les Femmes Du Maroc: La Grande Odalisque, 2008 Courtesy of the gallery In such speculative caves, Samir, who has won a Dutch Royal Award for Modern Painting in 2021 and was on show at Frieze London (2021), conveys in her frescoes the human side of playfulness and flesh. Samir speaks of “geological forms” and “narrative climax” and in Flickering by the Lotus Pond or the ambitious Hide and Seek (2021) we sense that these apparitions emerge from Promethean-like clay-potent and primordial. “It makes me constantly frustrated, because it was always men painting female models who are just standing still, not really doing anything,” she said in conversation with essayist and art critic Jonathan Griffin, referring to the traditional art historical representation of the female figure in Egypt over the last one hundred years. Their shapes create visceral, distorted perspectives. It feels at times as if they break into view from the background, in the manner of someone gasping for air at the surface of the sea after a long apnea dive, asserting a right to exist. This contrast suggests a dichotomy between what is and what could have been, but also the self-erasure that goes with conforming to patriarchal expectations.įigures, predominantly youthful, inhabit her paintings their silhouettes often blur and disappear in the background, such as in The Abrupt Plunge (2022) and A Disruptive Impulse (2022). At the back, we see a lonesome woman pumping water, performing domestic chores. Samir’s bold step to include and celebrate these elements lends a voice to denounce repressed sexuality, urgently call for emancipation via the body, and embrace life’s sensuality.Īt the forefront of the painting, the couple has sex, and children are beating drums. Samir, who now lives in the Netherlands, is from Egypt, a country where 92 percent of married women between the ages of 15 and 49 have undergone atrocious acts of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
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They follow a free lesson in how to please a woman and this isn’t anodyne. In this painting, we see boys and girls playing while others gaze towards a woman receiving oral sex.
Flickering by the Lotus Pond (2020-2022) elaborately shatters an artificial intimate-public divide.
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