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PRETTY CHIMERAS

12 JANUARY – 22 FEBRUARY 2019

 

Husk Gallery has the pleasure to present Nathalie Pirotte's first exhibition in the gallery. Pretty Chimeras is the Belgian artist's solo show with a series of recent paintings, featuring mainly women masked with animal heads or faces of which the eyes are intentionally covered or erased.

 

Women portraits are central to the painting work of Nathalie Pirotte. Specialized in masked portraits, she likes to play with media pictures in a copy-paste and recycling sense. The female artist draws her inspiration from movies, pink colours, animals, laces, flowers and hybridizations of all kinds. This is not only a research on identity but also on the medium of painting in the era of Photoshop. Oscillating between surrealism and pop culture, the mythological and the porn, her figurative work on the issue of the seduction of painting takes the form of the seduction as a woman.

 

Nathalie Pirotte depicts seductive women, which she transforms into anonymous subjects by literally erasing their face with paint. In Effigies, her intriguing series of women with animal heads, she clearly explores and interrogates female stereotypes. Her animal masks of rabbits, hinds, felines are recalling a chimera, an imaginary female monster compounded of incongruous parts. A chimera is something that exists only in the imagination and is not possible in reality. Whereas the artist has been adding sticker-like animal heads to women portraits, she creates a woman’s identity which is hoped for but at the same time illusory or impossible to achieve. Nathalie Pirotte’s absence of the face/eyes provokes a more pictorial reading going from the face to the context and increases the focus on the intimate, secret side of the subject.

 

Her latest series works with tags are featuring strong contrasts. In works like Tag Rose (2019), she gesturally added abstract layers of thick impasto on figurative black and white classical painted pictures of women. Created with the gaze of a female artist, the women portraits feature both eroticism and feminism. Depicting beautiful and apparently strong women, the construction of the female identity stands at the centre of Nathalie Pirotte’s art work.

 

Short CV

Nathalie Pirotte (°1965, Albertville) is a Belgian painter who lives and works in Brussels. In 1989 she completed her Master in Painting and 3D Research in La Cambre, Brussels.

 

In the past years her work has featured in solo shows in Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany, and she has also taken part in numerous group exhibitions in Belgium and abroad. Her work can be found in the following collections: Communauté française de Belgique, Unisys, BSB (B), Town of Ettelbruck (GDL), Town of Dudelange (GDL), City of Luxembourg (GDL), Sanrio (It) and in private collections in Europe, the United States and Australia. Nathalie Pirotte is also working as a painting teacher at the Arlon Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium.

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Ingrid Van Hecke, Husk gallery, Brussels (B)