Galleria Fonti, Naples Italy Project: Caught in the Folies-Bergere Artist: Birgit Megerle LISTE 18 The Young Art Fair in Basel, 2013

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Scarlett Carr
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1 Galleria Fonti, Naples Italy Project: Caught in the Folies-Bergere Artist: Birgit Megerle LISTE 18 The Young Art Fair in Basel, 2013 Project Description Birgit Megerle s recent research focuses on the perception of women in the history of painting. An eye pointed towards traditional feminist thought, and an ear towards the latest discourses on gender and representation. Megerle's work seems to be inexorably embedded in the continuous line pulled by these two strands. The female characters portrayed by Megerle want to convey an aggressive stance and are often depicted in unusual outfits; nevertheless they are enabled, recognizable subjects, very capable to allude to highly sexualized female identities. We find women standing with a rope in their hand, or with bow and arrow, often pointing to a goal outside the canvas. With her theater of figures, Megerle intends to challenge and mirror the stereotype of the objectified body, by corroding any known image and trying to overcome those hurdles implicitly, or explicitly imposed on women's identities. The project "Caught in the Folies-Bergère", specifically realized for LISTE 18 The Young Art Fair in Basel, was ignited by a series of works which were inspired by the famous Édouard Manet painting "Bar in the Folies-Bergère". The bar-maid at the center of Manet's masterpiece has a blank expression on her face. She rests for a moment, a girl spent at the console of a bar, surrounded by bottles which remind the shape of her own squeezed femininity: a man made silhouette sealed by a corset. Birgit Megerle isolates her face from the rest of Manet 's painting and reproduces the bar-maid on several irregular sized canvases, each of them measuring about 60 x 70cm. In each painting the colors and the accessories worn by the bar-maid were changed by the artist, as well as the general appeal of the character, now rendered in a more androgynous light. "I took over Manet's simplification of the shape of the face, making it more abstract, almost like a mask. All the backgrounds and sometimes the clothes dissolve into painterly gestures given by dots and grids. I copied also other elements from Manet's painting, for instance the sparkling champagne and liquor- bottles. It was a pleasure to paint the transparencies and highlights. On each canvas, I first glued images from the economic-section of a daily newspaper: people working as craftsmen in a company or renovating apartments. I attached holiday-villas, real-estate managers, luxurious dinners. Then I over-painted the photos, adding the still life from the bar". "My attention was also captured by a video about Manet written and produced by T. J. Clark in 1993 for the Roland Collection, and in particular about the notorious paintings "The bar in the Folies-Bergère" from and "Olympia" from I want to quote two sentences out of the video which I found remarkable, not only describing the women behind the bar, but all of us. We are all obliged to manage our appearances in a market situation and are less and less sure what the others appearances might signify. "We are all Olympia now."

Megerle's work seems to be inexorably embedded in the continuous line pulled by these two strands.

2 Édouard Manet, Un bar aux Folies Bergère, , oil on canvas, cm. 96 x 130

3 Birgit Megerle, Angry bar girl (after Manet), 2012, oil on canvas, cm. 60 x 80

4 Birgit Megerle, Still life with bottles 1 (after Manet) 2012, newspaper and oil on canvas, newspaper, cm. 60 x 70

5 Birgit Megerle, Diva, 2012, oil on canvas, cm. 60 x 70

6 Birgit Megerle, Shape of Shame, 2012, oil on canvas, cm. 60 x 70

7 Birgit Megerle, Sunset, 2012, oil on canvas, cm. 60 x 70

8 Birgit Megerle, Women with blue bow (after Manet) 2012, newspaper and oil on canvas, cm. 60 X 80

9 Birgit Megerle, Tangerines (after Manet) 2012, newspaper and oil on canvas, cm. 60 X 55

10 Birgit Megerle, Angry bar girl (after Manet), 2012, oil on canvas, cm. 60 x 80

11 Birgit Megerle, Passage, 2012, oil on canvas, cm. 150 x 120

12 Birgit Megerle, Polizeikontrolle, 2012, oil on canvas, cm. 150 x 120

13 Birgit Megerle, Kombination, 2012, oil on canvas, cm. 180 x 70

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