Her colour pallet consists of pastels with exaggerated use of yellow and pink, “it is easy to turn them from something little-girl-pretty into vomit and vagina skin.” ‘Everything you’re not supposed to be’ 2017 by Tash BrownĪs subject matter these grotesque haunting figures represent the artists, her lover, her family, her celebrity crushes and her dog. Tash has been known to venture from the traditional canvas to Perspex. I find that statement far richer than I could ever find my paintings.” Her preference is to let other people interpret her paintings, “A classmate once looked at a piece of mine and said it felt like a man had just killed someone but that was okay because his mom made him feel like it wasn’t his fault. She prefers not to have her work tied down to a specific classification.
Tash expresses that her work can be regarded as surreal but that it is her reality. I had an interview with her to see where she fits into the framework. Tash is a Johannesburg-based painter who is currently completing her studies at WITS. The next femme artist that falls into my list is Tash Brown. Marlene’s work can be considered to be surrealist in nature as she works with symbolism, a dreamlike, constructed reality and is concerned with psychoanalytic theory. Some examples of pieces that display these mutilated bodies is ‘Ponytails Continued’ – a set of legs without a torso and a floating head with no neck as well as ‘In My other half’s other half’ – a single large blue eye skewered through a large sculpture peering up at the eyebrow above. ‘Aura hour with cucumber’ 2016 by Marlene Steyn
At the same time the work evokes a sense of happiness. This body represented in her surreal world seems to be provoked by various objects and sinister beasts. The human body is depicted in her work as vulnerable, nude and disfigured with a strange beauty. When looking purely at the visual aspects of her art it can be described as disjointed body parts, animated features separated from faces, frying pans, fragments and distortions. Marlene has a peculiar ability to make violence playful in her work. Her symbolic visual language consisting of fried eggs, braided ropes of hair and the androgynous figure, molds into one as the key element of her practice. With repetition and irregular combinations, Marlene creates eerie themes surrounding her work. Her idiosyncratic motifs morph through unnerving established notions surrounding themes such as historical art narratives, psychoanalytic theory and popular tokens from modern culture.
Her immersive installation focused work creates an experience nurturing an eagerness for her constructed surreal worlds. Marlene Steyn is a Capetonian artist who obtained her Master of Fine Art degree in 2014 in London from the Royal College of Art. I discuss why they might fall into these classifications, as well as whether these classifications are still of relevance today. The artists manipulated their subjects’ appearance to express what cannot be easily seen.” Here I look at three South African femme artists who might fall into these classifications. Expressionism can be explained as follows, “Expressionist artists tried to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality. Surrealism often relies on alternative realities and dreams, and the psychoanalytic. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.” Surrealism focuses thus on an intuitive processes of creation not meant to be an accurate depiction of the world and is not concerned with what is regarded as beautiful but is centred around the functioning of thought.
So what is Surrealism and what is Expressionism in art? Surrealism was defined by André Bretonin the Surrealist manifesto of 1924 as “Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought.
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