May 12
The Index
1 result(s)
- Georgine Ingold - Guillaume Daeppen Gallery, Basel
1- Selfportrait #12, 2008, 16.5" x 22.8", oil on canvas
2- Selfportrait #16, 2008, 16.5" x 22.8", oil on canvas
3- Selfportrait #13, 2008, 16.5" x 22.8", oil on canvas
4- Selfportrait #11, 2008, 13" x 29.5", oil on canvas
Is it the carefully studied composition that catches our attention? Or the mysterious backdrops, sun-bathed exteriors or oppressive interiors plunged in half-light? Or the figures that people the images, idle and motionless, or attending to unfathomable occupations? A peculiar dramatic tension permeates the work of Swiss artist Georgine Ingold.
Yet her paintings do not tell stories. They are not narratives - instead they function as epiphanies, episodes of truth that unfold in the precise instant she's painting.
Although they are systematically entitled Selfportrait, the works in her latest series never show the artist's face. In fact, the characters inhabiting them seem to ignore her presence completely. Georgine Ingold doesn't represent herself. She represents female silhouettes, whose presence fragments as one draws nearer the painting, as the world goes to pieces within an impressionist painting seen up-close. And just as with the impressionists, the pieces assemble into deeply meaningful images. Self-portraits then, that are way more revealing than a simple reflection from the mirror.
Comprehension of this work suddenly condenses when one finds out that Ingold actually paints movie stills. Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet (1986), Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison County (1995): the artist isolates one frame from the flow of images, the tenth of a second when the presence of these women onscreen expresses an aspect of her own personality. In doing so she converts the cinematographic snapshots she's immortalizing into something profoundly painterly.
Georgine Ingold - Selfportrait
August 23 through September 20, 08
