Being Famous will be the third solo exhibition by painter Alice Ella at gallery-twenty-six. Her new works, in acrylic painting, drawing and watercolor are more powerful than ever:
As before, Ella‘s works of art captivate due to and excel through their motivic immediacy, with a considerable amount of their appeal lying in their typical aesthetics – however, the Alice Ella-signature style appears dynamized, energized: vigorous coloring, rich in contrast, effusive postures, iconic attributes, the memorable stylistic idiom somewhere between art deco, pop art and instagram-aesthetics, the recurring two central motifs – hat and mouth; in their interplay still transformed into a cipher – into an enigmatic symbol highly charged with complex meanings – yet more lively, more powerful; Alice-Ella-Signature-Style 2.0, so to speak; the highly stylized silhouettes of the figurines have emancipated themselves from their decorative flatness and, with a new self-confidence, have set out to explore what they feel like and what makes sense to them… – in this case, one of the most fascinating, historic and probably most famous places on the planet: Paris.
“Paris – this word alone evokes so many desires, symbols; Paris is an image in itself.”
These words by musician Juliette Armanet get to the heart of the matter: hardly any other city – even and especially in times of social media – is so exalted as a place of longing, full of glorified ideas and stereotypical dreams. To a certain extent, it is the city that – alongside New York – embodies and symbolizes what ‘famous’ implies. Fueled by literary and cinematographic representations (such as the recent “Emily in Paris”), a beguiling, multisensory cocktail has emerged, a very specific flair that shapes our image of this city in the collective consciousness, at least subliminally: art, fashion, beauty, style, elegance, savoir vivre. In other words, a place made for the pure evocation of beauty and glamor?
By the middle of the 17th century at the latest, Paris had already become the undisputed center of the Western world as far as music and fashion were concerned, and by the 1860s its appeal also reached unimagined proportions in the realms of fine art and literature, which was not to change for a good nine decades – until, in the aftermath of World War II, the focus shifted towards New York, due to Clement Greenberg and Abstract Expressionism. The international who’s who of the avant-garde made Paris the epicenter of art. This primarily involved the Rive Gauche, the area of the city south of the Seine, i.e. the Latin Quarter, the area around the church of St. Germain-des-Prés and the Montparnasse district.
As early as 1995, the cultural historian Andrea Weiss lifted a fact that had long been ignored from the archives of the city’s art and cultural history viathe title of one of her books : “Paris was a woman” – a self-confident, self-determined woman who reflected her potential on the pulse of the times and sought to live it out creatively!
Mindful of this fact, Alice Ella goes further and deeper: beneath the surface of the beautiful appearance of the ‘city of love‘ , whose aesthetic appeal is unquestionably considerable, a far more complex pull unfolds, gaze by gaze via fabulous female storytelling: the experience and experienceability of Paris as a projection surface for dreams, longings, ambitions, desires and self-concepts…
Being Famous synthesizes these set iconic pieces, the precisely calculated game with visual stimuli, with moments of struggle for a sense of self, authenticity and congruence. The depicted persons show themselves and express themselves – they are (re)presented and they demand to be, thus keep oscillating between public image and self-image, between statement and question.
The works shown in this exhibition are pictorial representations of women, who deliberately expose themselves to the gaze of strangers, seemingly driven by their willingness to face the eternal riddle of their own personality. The image composition and aesthetics are reminiscent of snapshots like they are frequently displayed on online portals such as instagram, where they have probably already become the most relevant tool when it comes to medial self presentation and self-staging.
Below the surface of the delicately balanced pictorial subjects, which are rendered with the great sensitivity and gentle humour typical for the body of work of the artist, references to current social discourses can be discovered quite easily, whether it be on the pursuit of strategies for, and various modi of, female self-assertion and empowerment.
Lookng at these pictures terms like “vigorous“, “confident“ and “zeitgeisty“ immediately come to mind, the impression of surprising ease the viewer gets again and again doesn‘t even dwindle where complex issues are explored. (For example in „Life Is a Circus“: the female figure rides a tiger that appears to be a living, dangerous predator, although the scenery refers to a carousel; she thus playfully conquers it, which on the one hand can be read as an emancipatory, empowered act per se, but on the other hand also specifically in the context of trauma and healing as”the tiger in the room” is a metaphor often used by trauma experts such as Dami Charf to illustrate the mechanisms of disregulation).
A la Carte II
Lumières de la Ville
You Can´t Buy Coolness
