cunt prints – a collection of works:
georgy girl: 2 series of 10 gouache body prints on paper – each sheet 100 x 100 cm
Series 1: 15 prints, gouache colours: cadmium red hue, purple magenta and cobalt green deep on watercolour paper (natural white, acid-free, lightfast) (work in progress)
Series 2: 15 prints, gouache colours: Delft blue, cadmium red deep, helio green bluish, Prussian blue on watercolour paper (natural white, acid-free, lightfast) (work in progress)
Insurance value (20 x 750,00) 15,000 Euros
Series 3: Special Edition of 5 with all aforementioned gouache colours – 24 x 32 cm
Insurance value each 600,00 Euros
georgy girl is a further series of cunt prints — body prints — that are this time centred in design. The title, based on the 1966 British film (founded on a book by Margaret Forster and directed by Silvio Narizzano) about a young independent woman and her emotional development towards adulthood, also alludes to Georgia O’Keeffe (1986) and her extraordinary flower paintings, which Judy Chicago paid tribute to in “The Dinner Party” exhibition of 1979.
In the 1970’s, feminist critics and artists declared her art uniquely female because of her centralized forms, “constructed,” in the words of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, “like labia of the vagina.”1
Art historically georgy girl also points towards Gustave Courbet’s painting “L’Origine du monde” (1866) and André Masson’s panel cover “L’Origine du monde ou Terre érotique” (1955), which both depicted the female sexual organs.
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She rejected the inclusion of her art in the 1970’s feminist canon of centralized core imagery, and sided with those who considered biological essentialism a misguided approach to women’s art. O’Keeffe, in short spent decades rejecting explanations of her flower imagery as sexualized embodiments of the female body, suggesting that these interpreters, male and female alike, were merely imposing their own psychosexual obsessions on her benign, decorative images.
O’Keeffe’s continuous denials have resulted in differing opinions among art historians, critics, and even the artist herself, whose private letters suggest more ambiguity than her public statements. Art historian Anna C. Chave, for example, argued that the artist deliberately developed “a (woman’s) language of desire”, to capture what O’Keeffe identified as “the unknown.” Rather than rendering the human body, Chave believed that O’Keeffe “portrayed abstractly …her experience of her own body” and her own desires through voids, canyons, crevices, slits, holes, voids, and soft, swelling forms. Chave further asserted that O’Keeffe’s art embodied her childlessness, her empty womb, as well as a sense of “plentitude and gratification.” As Wanda Corn explained, “her pronounced use of unfolding petals, eroticized stamens, and mysterious centers encouraged viewers to read in these works …sensuous body parts, especially those of female anatomy and male penetration.”
O’Keeffe indeed may have consciously intended to evoke such associations. She wrote in 1916, “The thing seems to express in a way what I want it to …it is essentially a woman’s feeling”; later in 1925, she wrote that “a woman …might say something that a man cant (sic) – I feel that there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.” In 1930, she stated, “I am trying with all my skill to do painting that is all of a woman, as well as all of me.” O’Keeffe’s intentions (albeit vaguely expressed) thus intersect with interwar discourse concerning women’s feelings, attitudes, and sexuality.2
Whether or not O’Keeffe’s flower paintings were intended as essentialist representations of woman, they have certainly become feminist icons — the artist gained outstanding recognition, with her painting “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1” when it was sold for a fortune, in 2014.3
In 1955, the psychologist Jacques Lacan acquired Gustave Courbet’s painting “L’Origine du monde” (1866) that depicted a naked woman’s torso with legs spread. This provocative oil was concealed in his apartment behind a contemporary image of the same subject, a painting by André Masson that Lacan commissioned.
“Courbet’s painting has become canonical, having been accepted by the French from the Lacan estate, in lieu of tax, in 1995. (…) it almost looked official, whereas Masson’s cover, known as Terre érotique (“Erotic Land”), showing the same view of a woman’s private parts but playing calligraphically on the idea of the body as a landscape, retained a sense of titillation. The terracotta-coloured panel was designed to slide back, so that Lacan’s visitors were treated to a drama of unveiling. This kept alive the practice tradition begun by the Origin’s first owner, the Ottoman ambassador Khalil-Bey, who hung the Courbet in a lavatory, behind a green curtain. And it has been learnedly suggested that this green curtain (blasphemously enough) was a reference to the fictive green curtain in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. The Masson cover remains in a private collection, while the Courbet belongs to the Musée d’Orsay.”4
“L’Origine du monde” and Masson’s panel cover “l’Origine du monde ou Terre érotique” (1955) were objectified images of a woman without an identity — nameless and disembodied generalisations of womanhood, depicted by male artists. While these pictures exploded a prohibition (the exposure of a woman’s sexual member in artwork) and were therefore innovative, the cunt prints are a feminist investigation, de-mystifying a remaining social taboo, because they have been produced by a woman — the female gaze addresses herself.
georgy girl are ornamental cunt prints; the marks do not clearly convey the subject matter but in the manner that a finger print embodies and represents the whole person, these are representations of womanhood. Within the intention however, is also a coded reference to the abuses of women — the artwork touches on the manner in which women and their sexuality are still regarded and controlled in some parts of the world. georgy girl was produced following an invitation to participate in a group exhibition organised to raise funds for a hospital ward — The Desert Flower Centre of Waldfriede Hospital, Berlin- where victims of Female Genital Mutilation are treated.
1 P. 127 – 8 Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe — Vivien Green Fryd
books.google.de/books?…
2 Ibid 1
3 A floral painting by the late US artist Georgia O’Keeffe has sold for $44.4m (£28.8m) at auction, setting a record for an artwork by a female artist. Analysis by Will Gompertz, BBC Arts Editor 21 November 2014
www.bbc.com/news/enter…
4 James Fenton, private view, The Guardian, Saturday 8 March 2008
www.theguardian.com/bo…
Presentation
Group Exhibitions
2016 (16−19.9) Tanya Ury presents georgy girl, no 5 of the 3rd cunt prints’ series (24 x 32 cm gouache body prints on watercolour paper), in “A Rose is a Rose”, the fundraising group exhibition supporting women patients suffering from Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), who are being treated at the Waldfriede Hospital, Berlin. The event takes place during Berlin Art Week, at Waldfriede Hospital’s Desert Flower Centre, Berlin (D)
Collections
2016 georgy girl no. 2 of the 3rd special edition, 24 x 32 cm, gouache body prints on paper, in private collection of Thanh Minh Nguyen, Cologne (D)
2016 (16−19.9) Tanya Ury presents georgy girl (cunt prints), no 5 of the 3rd series (24 x 32 cm gouache body prints on watercolour paper), in “A Rose is a Rose”, the fundraising group exhibition supporting women patients suffering from Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), being treated at the Waldfriede Hospital, Berlin. The event takes place during Berlin Art Week, at the Desert Flower Centre of Waldfriede Hospital, Berlin (D)