Part of the Editor's Choice series.
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Bonnie Collura, Sleeping Death (Martyr Yellow), 1997, plaster, gauzing, foam, 78×58×51 inches. Courtesy of Basilico Fine Arts.
Painted sleek and smooth, almost candy-coated in their plastic finish, Bonnie Collura’s sculptures long to be touched. They tempt, like a shiny red apple. And much like her luring, alluring work, Collura promises, and delivers much more than is at first apparent. She seems to thrill in manipulating the foam, plaster, putty, glue, and paint that compose her forms; but beyond that, she seems equally excited to not merely throw new spins on old iconography, but to weave at the very least three mythic narratives, and in doing so create an aggregate myth of female transformation.
In her first solo show at Basilico Fine Arts, Collura’s influences are easily apparent: her Sleeping Death (Martyr Yellow) clearly revisits Bernini’s The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni in all its swirling, Baroque drama; in White, Walt Disney’s Snow White is easily recognizable, although now it seems she’s sprouted antlers from her ears. Be it the Crow/Persephone fertility myth (see Sleeping Death’s accompanying corn cobs), the ecstatic Ludovica waiting for Christ and for Heaven to claim her, or the innocent, soon-to-be-rescued Snow White, Collura has traced the lineage to its source, thrown all these icons together, and then rebuilt them. She blends their stories; she transforms them, just as they have been transformed themselves. In longing to be touched, in luring us to stroke their polished surfaces, these sculptures also threaten to be like a poison apple—then we would be the ones who would be transformed.
—Jenifer Berman
First of all, I like Günther Uecker as a person. This is really important for me as an artist.
An artists on artists text on sculpture artist Thiago Rocha Pitta by Botika, accompanied by several photographs of mixed media sculptures and film stills by Thiago Rocha Pitta, the first titled Uma Trilogia.
A novel about female rage and the power to strike back.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Gillian Wearing, Mona Hatoum, Jim Lewis, Dale Peck, Maureen Howard, John Sayles, Steve Earle, Martin McDonagh, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina.
Work that is just about the technical or conceptual, personal or political, is fine; it meets the world with what’s in fashion. But there’s something else bordering on magic, that brings an artwork home, makes it land and resonate. You can’t really teach that so much as conjure it.
Kara Walker
