CFA is currently hosting a solo exhibition by Emily Mae Smith, titled "Feast of Totems".The exhibition presents a collection of new works by the artist. The artist paints subversive riffs on art history, injecting defiant language, design, and science fiction elements into classic settings. Staging a dialogue between the neo-classical and symbolist works from the twisted end of academic painting and her own visual language, these works become both humorous and critical. Smith’s meticulously rendered tableaux present a feast of codes, signs, and symbols. Gradated horizon lines posture a traditional composition, unsettled by the animistic brooms, fruit, and stilettos posing in the foreground. The artist's motifs occupy and distort art historical compositions, claiming space for feminine subjectivity."Many of the images are painted with contre-jour light, accentuating the experience of looking at a scene from behind, or a new perspective. The prickly pear in Fiction Flesh, a fruit born from fantasy, nuzzles into an electric pink tongue. This menacing symbiosis is at once seductive and grotesque, challenging the viewer to reconcile the strange coupling bathed in a soft glow. The fruits in this feast forbid their consumption, resist with thorny skins and sealed lips. An insatiable thirst and a desire to devour course through the work, as portals and structures are also adorned with cartoonish teeth. The erotically charged and subtly sinister imagery invokes the proto-feminist, Chicago imagist Christina Ramberg, while Magritte’s stylized influence is also apparent," says the gallery.Born in 1979, Austin Texas, Emily Mae Smith lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in Visual Art at Columbia University, New York (2006) and her BFA in Studio Art at the University of Texas in Austin (2002). Smith’s first institutional solo show opens at Le Consortium in Dijon, France in November 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include The Sphinx or The Caress, Simone Subal Gallery, New York, USA; Tesla Girls, Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium (2016); Honest Espionage, Mary Mary, Glasgow, Scotland, UK (2016). She also exhibited in Unrealism, a group exhibition organized by Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian, The Moore Building, Miami, FL (2015).The exhibition will be on view through July 14, 2018, at CFA, Grolmanstraße 32/33, 10623 Berlin - Charlottenburg, Germany. For details visit: www.cfa-berlin.deClick on the slideshow for a sneak peek at the exhibition. www.blouinartinfo.com Founder: Louise Blouin
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