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City Gallery
30 May - 22 Aug 2004 |
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Curatorial
Statement | Artist's
Résumé
In Liz Maw's painting Satan, a beautiful naked young
woman points a gun at her own head. In My Love, a man
with the head of a bull stands before us with an erect penis.
Maw's paintings are drenched with a sense of desire, beauty
and power. The virile, beautiful people she depicts are stylised,
distorted and charged with meaning. Unsettling in their content,
these are paintings that exude a potent sexuality.
Maw's output has been modest in numbers, if not scale; painstakingly painted over several months, each of her full figure portraits is almost life-size. Her sleek paintwork resembles air brushing in its precision, offering a surrealism somewhere between Salvador Dali and the kind of hot-rod paintings which stretch across panel vans.
My Love makes reference to the ancient Greek myth of
the Labyrinth. The Minotaur, a man with a bull's head, was
born to the Queen of Crete after she mated with a sacred bull.
To hide his shame, the King had a labyrinth constructed to
hide the monster. He then forced the Athenians to send fourteen
young men and women as annual tribute to be locked in the
Labyrinth for the Minotaur to eat. To stop the slaughter,
the hero Theseus volunteered to enter the Labyrinth and fight
the monster. On the advice of the king's own daughter, Ariadne,
Theseus brought a ball of thread, which he unwound as he went
through. He found the Minotaur, killed it and then used the
thread to find his way out of the maze.
The bull has always been a symbol of animal desire and in the ancient myths to conquer an animal signified ultimate control. Such mythical references abound in Maw's paintings, which she offers up as sumptuous layers of allusions.
Emma Bugden
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