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Kitten, 2004, Oil on board, 41.5x33cm
© Stella Vine 2004
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Geri, 2004, Oil on board, 61 x 51cm
© Stella Vine 2004
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Transition presents
Prozac and Private Views, a solo show by the artist Stella
Vine.
When Charles Saatchi purchased her painting of Diana, Princess of
Wales; (Hi Paul Can
You Come Over) from Transition earlier this year, Stella
Vine was propelled into the centre of a media frenzy and aspects
of her life story were filtered through that particularly English
kaleidoscope that is tabloid tale telling. Somehow in all this temporary
fiction, in the whole hoopla of burlesque outrage, the main point
got lost - the work itself.
Stella Vine is a contemporary figurative painter, a tightropey place
to be at present. Her paintings, however, far from being stuck in
some kind of revisionist retreading, trace a radical trajectory
that connects the Rococo lyricism of Gainsborough to the Kitchen
Sink storytelling of John Bratby, arriving at a modern gothic soup
of Dark Romanticism where it is possible to discern the artist thinking
with her brush.
In Prozac and Private Views, Vine directs her gaze to a cast
of enigmatic characters to whom she is irresistibly drawn. These
iconic figures, whose auras are photostatted onto our collective
consciousness (who died young and stayed pretty) become characters
in her own autobiographical petit dramas. Painting as an adrenalin
rush of mise en scene vignettes.
Vine's darkling theatre of identification, re-defines a contemporary
axis of representation where the melancholic gravitas of the work
is often balanced by deft touches of black humour. Prozac and
Private Views – her first solo show - is more self exploration
than exploitation with Vine’s preoccupation with the subject
matter centre stage. After the recent intense media scrutiny of
her private life, Stella has spent time making new work, retreating
into a fictive world “like a lost girl... a deranged teenager
trying to make a environment of loves, memories and desires”.
Intermingled with this Kristevean chora of salon style paintings
and miniatures of Granny, Alwnick Fair, loved ones and pets, Vine
includes Courtney Love, Bernadette of Lourdes and a Basquiat referenced
painting of Sylvia Plath on a cooker. Meanwhile the “crappy
pink fluorescent” Hotel Bernadette with its black arrow at
the entrance to the show resonates with connotations of “model
upstairs” defying any notions of a nostalgic comfort zone.
Not unlike the songs of P.J Harvey, which “dramatise the conflicts
of desiring and being desired”, Vine explores “a kind
of self exposure that uniquely combines seduction and threat, intimacy
and estrangement” (The Sex Revolts, Gender
Rebellion and Rock and Roll - Simon Reynolds and Joy Press -
Serpents Tail 1995)
Stella Vine was born in Alnwick, Northumberland and lives and works
in London. Her exhibitions include New Blood at The Saatchi Gallery,
London (2004) Girl On Girl
at Transition, London E9 (2004), Snow
at Transition, London E9 (2003), Fanclub
at Rosy Wilde, London (2003), Chockerfuckingblocked at Jeffrey Charles
Gallery, London (2003). |
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