Mary Boone Gallery, New York
till 27 giune 2015
[box type=”shadow” ]The artist Judith Bernstein and her frantic searching for de-sexualisation of female body, a boldly expression of anger on canvas, a struggle against men.[/box]
Judith Bernstein (1942) is a feminist artist famous for her erotic drawings. Born in a Jewish family in New Jersey, she learned to paint from his father, and obtained two degrees at Pennsylvania State University. After that she attained the Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University, where she discovered the first and strong opposition to the art of women. During her initiation to the art, she preferred to speak with graffiti, getting inspiration by Jackson Pollock. In 1964 she decided to focus on erotic art and drew a long series of violent and distressing paintings.
In New York, during that time, was really hard to break for any woman in the art field, especially for an artist like Judith Bernstein. “They did not take us seriously, they laughed at us,” she says, “they were not ready to our aesthetic. They were not open to women.” In fact, the woman is the main character of her troubled artistic career: she represents the genesis of the universe, an ancestral element, with her big bang symbolized by vagina, trying to intimidate and besiege the male sex with a persistent attack. It is a taboo of sexual slang on a canvas, where women can cultivate their anger in a secular urgent dialogue between penis and the birth.
Sexual symbols
The exhibition main characters are female genitals, reppresented in a large scale.
“Voyeur” donates a panorama of sketching and drawings by Judith Bernstein, the artist who, for fifty years, is fighting with conservatism with a cruel irony and sexual assaults on a large, super chromatic canvas. Abstract brushes for a psycho-sexual signals in extreme shapes of chaos, excesses and lunacy. Elements of female genitals used not as a symbol of repression but ad a clear sexual tool to unleash aggressiveness towards men, inhibiting impulsions, almost swallowing up them.
Bernstein was one of the founders of A.I.R. Gallery (the first gallery for women artists) and an activist of the movement Guerillas Girls.
The artist uses a dogmatic language in order to use painting for worship the vagina, depict as cosmic element, everything rounds around it, something scaring and something fertile.
Judith Bernstein works are in some of the most important museum: New Museum of New York; Studio Voltaire of London; MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) of New York; Whitney Museum of American Art; Brooklyn Museum and at the Jewish Museum of New York.
The exhibition curator is Piper Marshall.
Link. maryboonegallery.com
