Warren Blog

Saatchi-gallery asked:


Rebecca Warren’s earliest artworks to come to wide public attention and it remain a touchstone for what has followed. I observed her install the piece in an exhibition, “Material Culture,” which I co-curated with Michael Archer at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1997. The show considered different approaches to the object in British art of the past two decades. Even among such a deliberately heterodox assortment, Warren’s approach commanded special notice. She had created the work in her bedroom over a period of three months. This biographical information is relevant since the work’s contents and meanings are intimate and compacted. She started with a white plinth onto which she placed and replaced a selection of objects that were variously to hand. These included a jar containing a dead bee that a friend had brought to her. A scrunchie (an elastic band used to hold back hair) was stretched over the jar for safekeeping. Other items that came to rest on the plinth’s surface include a shell, a shard of green glass, a pair of underpants, and a safety pin. Warren constructed a wooden frame as a sketch for a Perspex cover. She never made the cover but kept the indicative frame. On it rested a large white envelope over which she had stretched another pair of underpants, its crotch gently padded with fluff from a washing machine. The envelope itself was also padded out with slides of the artist’s work.

Warren took pains to make her collection as simple as she could while avoiding the simply mundane. Her efforts were repeated in the exhibition installation, which took about a week. Warren clocked in daily at the gallery to spend hours tweaking the relative position of her sculptural ingredients. One sensed strongly that she was searching not for any formal or conceptual resolution to the piece but rather a conclusion of the opportunity available to work on it. This is not a trivial motive. It was clear that she took her role as a creative maker seriously and that the work would not be finished until the role was over, rather than the other way around.

Rebecca Warren’s Biography

BIOGRAPHY

1965

? Born London, United Kingdom.

1989 - 1992

? BA (Hons) Fine Art, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London

1992 - 1993

? MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art, London

1993 - 1994

? Artist in residence, Ruskin School, Oxford University, Oxford

? Currently lives and works in London

Rebecca Warren’s sculptures bring a whole new meaning to the term “Earth Mother”. Her women are like humungous primal fertility totems for the urban tribes of today. Big boobs, and big butts, dread locks and mini-skirts: being a **** is just an Amazonian side-effect of their self-control and empowerment.

Rebecca Warren’s sculpture shows off the process as making. Emerging from the half-hewed mud, Warren’s work makes illicit suggestions of **** figures and entwined couples, reminiscent of mojo-lamps and head shop knick-knacks. Warren serves up a feminist brand of macho-ism with an unlikely combination of classical Rodin vs. Jeff Koons.

What to Do Next…

Warren’s alter ego is a curiously powerful and positive proxy for a young woman artist working today to invoke. It carries certain resonances of Salvador Dalí’s obsession with “putrefaction” in the mid-1920s; Warren’s posture, like Dalí’s, consciously mingles disdain and admiration for her artistic antecedents. Please visit us on http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/rebecca_warren.htm



BLICKENSTAFF

Saatchi-gallery asked:


Rebecca Warren’s art likewise unites popular and high culture, feministic and psychological debate. All this is not primarily some ironic statement or the offended criticism fired by the traditional male portrayal of the female body. Warren is not actually concerned with these male artists as such, seeking rather to position herself directly as the next in the traditional lineage - maybe the way Kathryn Bigelow can do a Hollywood thriller and at the same time intelligently misrepresent male clichés. Her large “women” seem to confidently and brazenly flaunt the insignia of their desirability. Her work is akin to an exciting thriller on the topics of figurative portrayal, representation and fiction.Rebecca Warren sees her collages as “magical objects”. Like her crudely made figurines they also evoke a sense of the ever present doubtful authenticity of the artist’s studio. One believes one is in the studio or almost sensing the presence of the “model” in the room, but all of this is a more fictional, maybe virtual situation, a dense universe of possibilities, which composes itself for the purpose of transitory, continuously regenerating contents.

Rebecca Warren’s sculptures bring a whole new meaning to the term “Earth Mother”. Her women are like humungous primal fertility totems for the urban tribes of today. Big boobs, and big butts, dread locks and mini-skirts: being a **** is just an Amazonian side-effect of their self-control and empowerment.Larger than life, Warren’s sculptures are girl-next-door superheroes: barbaric and strong, protecting and kind, energetic and bold: icons of the ideal ‘every woman’ taken to the extreme.Figures of fantasy emulation, Warren’s sculptures make successes of their ’short-comings’: malformed hands, or slight weight problem are things to be celebrated; and their shoes are always amazing. Warren’s women are ravishing just the way they are. If their confident, over-the-top sexuality seems a little dirty, that’s because it is — literally. They’re entirely made of clay.

Inventing a race of superwomen is a process of immediacy. Starting with a skeletal support structure, Warren builds up her sculptures with an almost impressionistic fervour, physically beating and shaping mounds of clay into an extension of her imagination, working against the clock before the material hardens.From the start, Warren’s sculptures are designed for speed. Mounted on castered boards, Warren’s uber-frauen glide like primadonnas, skate like perennial students, and race like businesswomen.It’s an aesthetic reminiscent of artists such as Rodin and Boccioni. But with a contemporary twist: Their caricaturish portrayals owe as much to comic book legends such as Robert Crumb and those naughty 70s Penthouse cartoons.Warren plays with these ideals of male fantasy and representation, and re-incorporates their exaggeration and slap&tickle humour into a perversion and triumph all her own.Their plinths are integral extensions of their personalities — as well as being an excellent ergonomic device for moving them about her studio. Everything about her work reveals, and draws the viewer into, the process of making.



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