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'The figures populating Genieve Figgis’s paintings emanate from some luminescent netherworld, suspended between life and death, or living life and death or life through death in a land of the willingly lost…'
—David Rimanelli, Wonderful Party, DarlingVibrant and wickedly humorous, Genieve Figgis’s dark reimagining of historical society portraiture presents us with a world turned inside out, the smooth neo-classical veneer of Joshua Reynolds or Johann Zoffany peeled away to reveal what lurks just below the civilised orderliness of their surfaces. Picking away at broader notions of English civility as much as more historically specific attitudes to land, women, and conceptions of ownership, Family in the Grass embodies Figgis’s appropriation of visual codes associated with the eighteenth-century domestic family portrait or ‘conversation piece’ in order to gently ironise the socio-cultural ideals that it maintained.
Johann Zoffany, The Dutton Family in the Drawing Room of Sherborne Park, Gloucestershire, c. 1774, oil on canvas, Private Collection. Image photo © Mark Fiennes Archive / Bridgeman Images Conjuring up atmospheric narratives steeped in Gothic drama with remarkable economy, Figgis’s richly painted, liquid surfaces and confident use of heavy colour work together with her highly induvial approach to figuration to produce unforgettably macabre distortions of facial expression and form. Executed in carefully controlled palette of mossy greens, swirling whites and dense blacks in Figgis’s characteristic wet-on-wet application of acrylics, Family in the Grass places familial dynamics - and the tensions between their reality and appearance – centre stage.
'My interest in history is about the storytelling. Art, music, literature, architecture, and archaeology all take you back in time. I use these as starting points and go from there. I became very interested in contemporary figurative painting because the figure is so present in the history of art. The idea of portraiture being used to flatter the ego seemed ancient.' —Genieve FiggisStanding possessively behind their five daughters, a couple in the manner of Jane Austen’s Mr and Mrs Bennett present us with their five daughters grouped obediently at their feet, the long line of their Regency robes wrapped underneath their legs in confident, fluid brushstrokes. Preoccupied with securing advantageous marriages and thus financial security for their children who, as daughters, would be unable to inherit their father’s estate and modest fortune, Mrs Bennett’s hysterical handwringing is amplified in Family in the Grass, the intense collisions of colour and ghoulish contortions of their faces humorously expressive of the absurd precarity of social status and fragility of appearances under such social conditions.
Emerging as a favourite amongst critics and collectors alike, it is no surprise that Figgis’s Baroque approach to costume and historical detail has been cited as direct influence for costume designer Ellen Mirojnick’s imaginative approach to the phenomenally popular Bridgerton series. Sampling Regency fashion and mixing it with sumptuous fabrics and a heightened sense of colour and pattern, Mirojnick’s approach to the historical specificity of fashion and design clearly resonates with Figgis’s assertion that ‘Anyone approaching history is reinventing it.’i
Scene from the 1995 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in which the family react to news of Lydia’s engagement.
i Genieve Figgis, ‘Art that Sings: A Q&A with Genieve Figgis, Dodie Kazanjian, in Genieve Figgis
New York, Skira Rizzoli, 2017, p. 146來源
紐約 Half 畫廊
現藏者購自上述來源文學
Donald Cumming, Below the Line, New York, 2015, n.p. (illustrated)
8
《家庭在草地》
款識：genieve figgis 2015（畫背）
壓克力 畫布
120 x 100 公分 (47 1/4 x 39 3/8 英吋)
2015年作
估價
£70,000 - 100,000 ‡♠
成交價£126,000
Simon Tovey
New Now主管
+44 20 7318 4084
STovey@phillips.com
New Now
倫敦拍賣 2021年7月13日
27
此拍品已不再提供買賣。
