Untitled (de Kooning/Raphael) #2
Andrea Fraser
Andrea Fraser
Untitled (de Kooning|Raphael) #2, 1984|2005
Digital c-print
101.6 x 76.2 cm (unframed)
104.1 x 78.5 x 3.8 cm (framed)
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
Photo: Courtesy the artist | Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
- Date
- 2007
- Medium
- Digital c-print
- Dimension
- 101.6 x 76.2 cm, 104.1 x 78.5 x 3.8 cm (framed)
- Credit
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
- This artwork is part of the donation and long-term loan from TBA21 to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Details
Artist Andrea Fraser is a prime example of what is known as institutional critique, a practice that seeks to highlight and question the structures underpinning art, historiography, and institutions. For this purpose, Fraser draws on feminist, psychoanalytic and sociological theories.
This untitled series builds on an earlier project of 1984 in which the artist superimposed images of Renaissance and modernist painters taken from libraries and museum shops, shattering the artwork's aura of integrity through its mechanical reproduction—and subversion—and accordingly emphasizing its fetishist nature. Here she combines Raphael's Madonna and Child with depictions of women by American painter Willem de Kooning, merging the violence of his expressionistic brushwork with the Apollonian idealization of the Renaissance. The result is a simultaneous presentation of two opposite prototypical visions of femininity in Western art: beatific purity and abject monstrosity.
(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "Encounters", MNTB, Madrid, 2023)
