REENA SPAULINGS – LIFE AT SEA
2020-04-20The high-viz yellow image of two peasant girls is based on a Camille Pissarro painting we used to visit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The anarchist-Impressionist made many paintings and drawings of laborers shown in moments of rest, napping, spacing out, gossiping and just being there in bucolic landscapes. Awkward croppings and intimate angles make these figures of not-working workers float strangely against harsh, multicolored fields. Here, one figure sits wedged in the painting’s lower left corner as the other leans on her hoe.
They are seen chatting together against a tilted rectangle of cultivated land, with the horizon pushed back almost as far as it can go. The empty space between the girls, imagined now as a sort of viral gap, full of potential communication, is echoed by an extra area of blank neon yellow to their right. We named our painting New Models after the Berlin-based website and podcast.
Opposite – New Models (after Pissarro), 2020
Exhibition runs through to April 25th, 2020
Galerie Neu
Linienstraße 119 abc
10115 Berlin
Germany