Collection of Paintings and Exhibitions of Artist Rebecca Warren
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 babe 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 nude 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.
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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
View Rebecca Warren paintings, biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and resource of Rebecca Warren. View art online at The Saatchi Gallery - London contemporary art gallery. Rebecca Warren
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