TURNER GALLERIES... 2007 EXHIBITIONS

www.bezor.com.au

Annette has become well known for her large scale ‘portraits’ of women.

She sources these female faces from art history, [appropriating from famous paintings by artists such as De Lempicka and Tretchikoff], soft porn, self portraits, seductive media blondes, her friends and her imagination. Each image has evolved from the original, the colours changed, the faces subtly manipulated and backgrounds renewed.

The large scale and repetition of these faces is reminiscent of 1960s Pop Art. The faces are rendered commonplace and mimic the image saturation that surrounds us in contemporary society. By reproducing her own work in multiples, albeit each with noticeable changes, she questions the ethical and cultural ramifications of moving from original to copy. Is the copy still an original even if the work it is copying is a reproduction of a work by another artist? Does the impact and desirability of a work lessen when it is reproduced ad nauseam like the Mona Lisa? This is not to imply that these works are without power, their beauty, technical finesse and large scale refutes this. The notions of sexuality, ethnicity and gender are challenged in these paintings.

These potent works confront the viewer with preconceived ideas of female beauty, our obsession with youth and the unblemished skins of airbrushed magazine girls. Annette sometimes incorporates images of flowers alongside, behind, or over her portraits. Implying perhaps, that a woman’s beauty is ephemeral like that of a flower, and again questioning our obsession with it.

In her most recent paintings Annette has applied stylised designs over the works, flattening out the picture plane and the three dimensionality of the work behind. This forces the viewer to acknowledge that her images of women are simply that, just images, nothing like the real woman they may have been inspired by.

They are muses for our contemporary idealised world - the film star, the fashion model and the girl in the glossy magazine ad. They are women, looking out from the canvas, to question and challenge our assumptions of objectification of the female form, asking us to think about gender, art, and popular culture. Asking us to give more than a passing thought to the submerged personalities, of those portrayed. Those that are glossed over with the superficiality of our time.

Annette Bezor’s painted women overwhelm us by their dominating size, their sexuality and power. Richard Grayson says of Annette’s work “ She is possessed of, and by, a passionate gaze and her work has repeatedly investigated and analysed the gazes changing situations and conditions.”