The title of Gippsland Art Gallery’s exhibition ‘Shock of the Nude’ may seem anachronistic to some, a relic of the days before HBO’s TV shows Game of Thrones, and Girls. The media is saturated with nudity – is anyone genuinely ‘shocked’ by the nude anymore? However, as curator Anton Vardy says, Gippsland’s new exhibition addresses new concerns, in many ways related to overexposure. Why is the nude still so shocking? “Maybe what we’re shocked about is seeing real bodies rather than the stylised ideal of the human figure,” Vardy hypothesises.
The exhibition features a slew of international and local artists, all of whom approach representations of the naked human form in different ways. Vanessa Beecroft, David Bromley, Jane Burton, Paul Cox, Rennie Ellis, Lucian Freud, Siri Hayes, Sophie Hewson, Petrina Hicks, Carol Jerrems, Paul Knight, Mimi Kelly, Norman Lindsay, Stewart MacFarlane, Robert Mappelthorpe, Amanda Marburg, Neil Moore, Gerard O’Connor, Alexia Sinclair, Helmut Newton, David Warren are all represented in the show.
Each of these artists’ work featured in this exhibition lends itself to the age old debate over the distinction between the concept of ‘the nude’ and nakedness, whether there even is a distinction, or what connotations attach themselves to these terms and what that means for our perception of the human form.
Provocative international works provide an interesting context and lineage for more recent works in the exhibition. Robert Mappelthorpe’s artworks were always boundary pushing, his homoerotic and BDSM works forcing viewers to rethink and react. Likewise, Lucian Freud quite literally poked holes in the traditionally idealised human body, presenting imperfect figures; dimpled, aged, real. Both artists sought to represent the body as it was – to confront viewers with real life, in strong opposition to hundreds of years of idealisation and artifice.
Not unlike a grand history painting of Charles Le Brun or Rubens, Alexia Sinclair’s Boudica lends a voice to the historical narrative of the nude. The fantastical grandeur of the work leans heavily towards tradition and history, whilst firmly grasping the modern. A contemporary representation of the Celtic queen who, in AD 60, led an uprising against the Roman Empire, Sinclair’s work encapsulates the main thread of this exhibition, that being a contemporary revisioning of a classic concept. The central figure’s nakedness is a source of her power, posed provocatively in a traditional costume.
Mimi Kelly’s beautiful portrait is reminiscent of a classical nude, a brunette Venus – that is, with the exception her violently mutilated left leg. Kelly comments on the price of an unrelenting pursuit of ‘beauty,’ and the lengths one will go to in this pursuit.
An artistic subject of significant historic value, the naked human form has always been present in art in one form or another, changing with the times as rulers come and go, philosophies change and art moves forward. Gippsland Art Gallery’s exhibition addresses the historic lineage of its subject, whilst presenting contemporary treatments of it, and asking important questions of the audience.
Gippsland Art Gallery
6 April to 26 May, 2013
Victoria
Gerard O’Connor, Bordello (detail), 2010, type-C print, 126 x 197cm
Mimi Kelly, Untitled #4, 2010, digital photographic print, 57.15 x 76.2cm. Photography by Dan Freene
Courtesy the artists
