#1980sArt hashtag - Bluesky

@mdstamper.bsky.social

6 days ago

A large square painting shows two stylized women pressed close together against a dark, nearly black-blue background alive with looping, chalk-like lines in white, violet, blue, and green. In the foreground, a seated woman dominates the composition. Her body is rendered in hot reds and crimson-pinks, with outlined breasts, and one long arm holding her bent knees. Her skin is not naturalistic, but transformed into glowing red tones that make the body feel heated, theatrical, and emotionally charged. Her face is elongated, with dark shadowed eyes, red lips, and pale, tangled hair flaring upward and outward. Behind and beside her is a second woman in deep green, her lighter face framed by loose curls and a dramatic wide red hat. The figures seem enveloped by a haze of scribbled marks, as if smoke, energy, memory, or music were moving around them. The title “Girlfriends” turns closeness into the subject of the work. Russian artist Edouard Zelenine does not paint these women as calm portrait sitters. He makes them electric, unstable, glamorous, and slightly dreamlike. The intense red of the foreground figure suggests heat, desire, exposure, and vulnerability, while the second woman, partly veiled in green and shadow, feels like companion, witness, or intimate counterpart. The museum’s LGBTQ tagging is fitting here as the painting invites a reading of female intimacy that exceeds ordinary sociability and enters the territory of romance, erotic charge, and queer visibility. By 1984, Zelenine had long since left the Soviet Union and was living in France, and that biographical shift matters. This image feels shaped by exile as much as by performance. Identity is staged, but not fixed. Affection is visible, but not fully explained. The women become both real presences and emotional symbols of desire, companionship, artifice, and freedom.

“Girlfriends” by Эдуард Зеленин / Edouard Zelenine (Russian, active in France) - Oil on canvas / 1984 - Mead Art Museum at Amherst College (Amherst, Massachusetts) #WomenInArt #EdouardZelenine #ЭдуардЗеленин #Zelenine #MeadArtMuseum #AmherstCollege #arte #artText #artwork #RussianArtist #1980sArt

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Michael

@mdstamper.bsky.social

2 weeks ago

American artist Robert Colescott made this painting late in a career devoted to recasting Western art history through Black presence, satire, and critique. Here he reworks Picasso’s "Les Demoiselles d’Avignon" and shifts the scene from Avignon to Alabama, moving the conversation from European modernism into the charged terrain of American race history. He once said he wanted to move back toward the African women at the source of Picasso’s borrowed forms and to imagine not “Africanism” as fantasy, but women as lived reality. The title word "Vestidas" (clothed) also plays against traditions of the female nude, suggesting costume, concealment, and social coding. Five women fill the canvas in a staged interior that feels crowded, theatrical, and knowingly artificial. Their bodies are large, angular, and exaggerated rather than naturalistic. At center and left, three Black women stand or recline in patterned dresses, their limbs and torsos broken into sharp, Cubist-like planes. At far right, a pale blonde woman with blue eyes appears partly turned toward the viewer, her body posed as spectacle. Another figure twists near the middle ground. A slice of watermelon sits at the front edge like an offering or warning. The palette is heated with pink, red, tan, black, cream, acid green, and blue all applied in loose, muscular brushwork. Faces are masklike expressions. No one seems relaxed. The women read less as individuals in a calm room than as figures inside a history of looking, desire, stereotype, and display. The blonde figure may embody a Eurocentric beauty ideal, while the watermelon transforms Picasso’s still-life reference into a racially-loaded symbol of anti-Black caricature. The result is potentially funny, abrasive, and unsettling on purpose to be a painting about who gets painted, who does the painting, and how modern art’s celebrated breakthroughs were entangled with colonial extraction and racialized desire.

“Les Demoiselles d’Alabama: Vestidas” by Robert Colescott (American) - Acrylic on canvas / 1985 - Seattle Art Museum (Washington) #WomenInArt #RobertColescott #Colescott #SeattleArtMuseum #SAM #FigurativeArt #BlackArt #art #arttext #AfricanAmericanArtist #AfricanAmericanArt #1980sArt #BlackArtist

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