"The London-based South African artist works at the intersection of beauty, image-making, and cultural critique-revisiting the visual language of hyper-femininity not as ornament, but as a site of tension, contradiction, and power. Evoking Rococo seduction and early Surrealist ambiguity, her voice is unmistakably of this moment. As Robson notes, "Femininity is a life-long game, one that requires you to be devoted to your own contortion." The exhibition reveals that paradox-with tenderness, unease, and visual clarity."
"Her practice engages with the visual and material textures of femininity, where hyper-aestheticised relics of girlhood, and their shelf of souvenirs-a pair of porcelain angels in prayer, a heart-shaped locket and harlow-gold hair-are neither fetishised nor dismissed but repurposed as important signifiers of girlhood.Soft femininity is often mistaken for passivity, but in Lucy's work, it is wielded with sharp intentionality, its connotations rendered uncanny through their very excess."
Lucy Robson presents paintings that interrogate hyper-femininity as a contested site of tension, contradiction, and power. Her work blends Rococo seduction with Surrealist ambiguity to create a contemporary visual voice. She repurposes hyper-aestheticised relics of girlhood—porcelain angels, heart-shaped lockets, harlow-gold hair—as signifiers rather than nostalgic ornaments. Soft femininity in the paintings is wielded intentionally, its excess rendering connotations uncanny. Blushed hues and decorative motifs sit in friction with latent threats such as outstretched feet, raised veins, and tender gasps. The work questions where feminine power resides, whom it serves, and what narratives it conceals.
Read at Juxtapoz
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]