Description
2021
Gouache, acrylic, colored pencil and graphite on panel
30 x 19 cm
Artist statement: “My work depicts fragile scenes based on both religious iconography and my transgender experience. Looking to medieval panel paintings dislocated from their time and place, I re-define their iconography to create new intimate narratives about femininity. The lonely figures in my work exist in a state of ambiguity, investigating abstracted artifacts of the past. With hesitant glances, timid expressions, and delicate gestures, the androgynous bodies that populate my paintings are lost in planar spaces of ambiguous depths. Enshrined in architectural frames, the scenes are enclosed and inward looking, reflecting both a spatial and psychological interiority. Rather than depicting images with a fixed, theological meaning I am searching for psychological spaces with open-ended, subconscious meanings. In this manner, I use iconography not as a canonical model but as a framework to explore gender dysphoria and anxieties surrounding history.”
Drawn directly and painted flatly with little embellishment, Mae Alphonse Dessauvage’s (b. Bruges, Belgium) works emphasize the planes of paint in relation to the architectural framing. In Dessauvage’s ongoing reliquary series, the dynamic between image, narrative and form is projected three-dimensionally into an architectural object. Dessauvage received her BA from Columbia in 2017 and MA from Harvard in 2021. Recent solo exhibitions include Oh, The Ripe Air! at Tatjana Pieters in Ghent, Belgium, The Weight of Angels at Artspace in Richmond, Virginia, and Figures and Objects at BAAA Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can view more of her work on her website.
Given the nature and medium of this piece, we will arrange additional shipping & handling payments after the auction. If you would like an estimate before bidding, contact emma@archipelagobooks.
