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"Painted in her trademark glitter and flocking on
canvas, Nancy Drew’s paintings embrace and amp up the notion of
"retinal art" by making it vibrate with familiar if unexpected associations. Made with a view to confecting eye candy for the 21st
Century, Drew’s paintings make a large claim for their own uniqueness in today's contemporary artistic practice.
The Artists Series is made up of portraits of
the works of some of her "favorite 20th century artists,"
many of which she "grew up with" and "visited
regularly at the MOMA" as a child with her father.
Renditions in her own materials of paintings by Arshile Gorky,
Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock, Nancy Drew’s paintings
function less as ironical critique than as artistic cover
versions of some of the biggest artistic hits of the 20th
century.
More John Coltrane’s "My Favorite Things" than The Slits’ "I Heard It Through The
Grapevine," Drew’s
glitter and flock versions of the celebrated, canonical paintings of her favorite
Abstract Expressionists are more homages done in the spirit of celebration than deconstructions of a
picked-over modernist tradition. Nonetheless, Nancy Drew's artistic transpositions can't help but turn
the high seriousness of their sources on their ear. Feminized and beautified beyond instant
recognition,
Nancy Drew's works stand on their own as highly original links between a much
abused, largely
unrecovered past and a present generous with rich painterly
possibilities.” |
