JULIA DUBSKY – M/MODESTY
2021-02-15Julia Dubsky’s paintings weave a playful web of references to the history of painting and ideas drawn from literature. In a speculative essay ‘M/modesty’ to be published this Spring, she probes the notion of modesty and its application to the ‘feminine’. Her research for this essay coincided with the making of this recent body of paintings focussing on the ‘Fig Leaf’, modesty’s earliest symbol.
The works were made in Wexford, Ireland, and in Dubsky’s studio in Berlin. In both locations there was a fig tree nearby, whose leaves she drew over and over. In each space she also kept to hand an image of the painting Infidelity (1570-75) by Paolo Veronese. The work depicts a fig plant growing in front of a drape that is failing to perform its function as a cover for a woman’s nakedness (As TJ Clark notes in Heaven on Earth, Veronese would have been aware of the representational irony of painting a fig tree in front of a drape so that its decorativeness acts doubly: both imposed like decoration on the cloth depicted and as a decorative painting on stretched canvas.)
Opposite – Fig Rabbit Duck (Kaninchen und Ente), 2020
Exhibition runs through to March 27th, 2021
Amanda Wilkinson
1st Floor, 18 Brewer Street
W1F 0SH
London
