For a while I have been working with portraiture. I have made some self-portraits and some imaginary portraits that use portraits by other artists as their starting points. I have been unpicking historical imagery and the tradition of portraiture and people in art. I have been playing with the ideas of “Great Art”, “Old Masters” and “Oil Painting” as traditions and representative of the history and place of art in society. This work relates a lot to the past and my relationship as a contemporary artist with all the art that has gone before me. It relates to the struggle for and potential impossibility of originality and identity.
Before, I had been doing quite a lot of work from pictures of products and magazine pages from interiors or fashion magazines. I also did some work based on images from holiday brochures and high-end furniture catalogues. This work was a critique of the dream making marketing machine we live amongst in cities like London. For my degree show piece I projected a double page spread from Elle Decoration magazine onto large sheets of grey paper and drew the pages in pastel. My drawing scaled up the magazine page which was almost entirely taken up with the photograph of a large up-market Berlin apartment. My scaling up meant that the image of the interior became life-size, occupying the real space of an interior akin to a Tromp L’oie. The text became like a posterised slogan taken out of it’s usual context and space and confronting a room full of people at once rather than just those choosing to read it in the magazine. By changing the media and size of the original image I was trying to reveal the absurdity and fakery of the original but also reveal the huge and controlling presence that the media is in our lives.
Just recently I have been looking a lot at the work of Cy Twombly. I have now begun working abstractly leaving all figurative elements out of my work for the first time really. This feels important. I have always been interested in the marks themselves and in reading about Cy Twombly’s work I read about “embodied marks, imbued with the spirit of a gesture in a particular place and time”. This is very important in my own work and always has been, though I have mostly incorporated figurative elements in my work to a greater or lesser degree and have been interested with narrative which has tended to take over from gesture. Still, I have enjoyed the contrast between the figurative and abstract parts of my work, but I have always been into the spirit of the gesture and it is this that I feel I want to explore much more right now.
I am excited by the prospect of being able to work with absence, rubbings out and submergings.
rosa roberts
5 Rue Du Moulin
06300
Nice
Alpes Maritimes
France
Europe
