She/her
Beyond the Gaze confronts the overwhelming accumulation of the idealised female nude across the most recognised periods of Western art history. The circular format acts as a lens, concentrating these figures together and magnifying the impact of their relentless representation. In doing so, the work gestures toward the traditions that confined these figures whilst actively refusing to be contained by them.
Inspired by first hand encounters across the National Gallery, the Uffizi and the Louvre, where many of the paintings that inform these collages are housed, and created almost entirely by male artists, this work questions how pleasure, beauty and desire have long operated within these visual traditions and on whose terms.
Informed by Raaberg’s concept of femmage, which reframes fragmentation as a political act of reclaiming visual traditions historically closed to women, and Mulvey’s theory that the female form has long existed as an aesthetic subject rather than maker of meaning, applying these concepts to art raises questions of narrative, agency and how these images were constructed for mass consumption through a male lens, shaping the way we have been conditioned to view these figures visually.
