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When the English artist Somaya Critchlow was at art school around a decade ago, she once showed a tutor a painting she had made of her cousins sitting on a sofa. When the teacher likened it to the glam-realist style of David Hockney, Critchlow was taken aback.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis sucks,\u201d she recalled thinking. \u201cThat\u2019s not what I want to paint.\u201d<\/p>\n
Critchlow was developing a deep affinity for the naked form at the time. But that felt at odds with everything she was learning at art school about conceptual art, and everything her feminist mother had taught her about female objectification.<\/p>\n
For Critchlow, 31, the shift that happened when modernism took over as the dominant form of artistic expression never resonated. She likes her paintings old \u2014 Renaissance era, to be specific. Even Matisse\u2019s poetic \u201cBlue Nudes\u201d series, for example, is not her cup of tea. (\u201cNo disrespect to Matisse,\u201d she said.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
This is perhaps why Dulwich Picture Gallery, a London museum known for its collection of over 600 old master paintings, is the perfect place for Critchlow\u2019s debut at a major British institution. Her exhibition, \u201cThe Chamber,<\/a>\u201d running through July 20, is part of the museum\u2019s \u201cUnlocking Painting\u201d program, which puts contemporary painters in dialogue with the works it owns.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Lucy West, a Dulwich Picture Gallery curator who worked on Critchlow\u2019s show, said, \u201cSomaya had so many factors that made her the perfect fit. She grew up close to Dulwich Picture Gallery, so she was a regular visitor as a child. Also, she is a painter who has been endlessly fascinated by the old masters.\u201d<\/p>\n The display features six newly commissioned paintings, all of naked Black women, a signature subject for Critchlow.<\/p>\n The artist said that she was fascinated by the idea of a chamber as a personal room but also a public space. The exhibition title takes its cue from Angela Carter\u2019s \u201cThe Bloody Chamber,<\/em>\u201d a collection of short stories published in 1979. In the title story, a young pianist marries an aristocrat, then later discovers his collection of sadistic pornography and a torture chamber containing the bodies of his three previous wives. Crtichlow said she had long been fascinated by the way in which Carter used volatile stories to explore ideas about \u201cwomen with agency.\u201d<\/p>\n Her works were also influenced by Walter Sickert\u2019s 1910 essay \u201cThe Naked and the Nude<\/a>,\u201d Chritchlow said, which draws a distinction between these two states \u2014 the former being an art historical trope, and the latter being an intimate expression of the human form.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In one Critchlow painting, a woman perches on a chair, looking backward over her shoulder, with her exposed buttocks as the viewer\u2019s focal point. In another, a woman cups her breasts while looking in the mirror.<\/p>\n Critchlow said she had been apprehensive about displaying her mischievous nudes in the Dulwich Picture Gallery\u2019s grand spaces, but when she spoke to the curators about it, \u201cThey were just like, \u2018Oh, we didn\u2019t even think about it because we\u2019re surrounded by nudes all day in here,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cThis show really just allowed me to embrace that storytelling and narratives is a big thing.\u201d<\/p>\n She added that she was influenced by the religious stories and myths in works by Peter Paul Rubens and Gerrit Dou, which are displayed alongside her work in the show. She studied those paintings, and others from the Dulwich Picture Gallery collection, while preparing for the commission, she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI got really fixated on oil paint,\u201d she said. \u201cI ended up doing a lot of research into Goya\u2019s palette, Titian\u2019s palette, Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s palette.\u201d<\/p>\n In the last five years, Critchlow\u2019s nude figures rendered in rich earthy tones have attracted attention and acclaim. Her work has been acquired by major museums in Europe and the United States, including the British Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She started out showing with the New York galleries Fortnight Institute and Efra\u00edn L\u00f3pez, and had her first British solo show in 2020, at Maximillian William<\/a>, the London gallery that now represents her. But that show was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, and ending up opening in the summer.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring that time, everything happened with George Floyd, and this moment erupted,\u201d she said. \u201cMy first solo show in London just opened bang in the middle of all that going on.\u201d<\/p>\n With Black Lives Matter driving the news agenda, there was a surge of interest in the work of Black painters, including her own, Critchlow said. \u201cIt put me on the defensive about being included in shows about Blackness. My fears of being reduced were being played out in front of me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It wasn\u2019t that she believed these shows weren\u2019t necessary, she said, but the haste with which institutions rushed to acquire and showcase work by Black artists \u201cfelt like a trend,\u201d she added. \u201cIt didn\u2019t feel authentic.\u201d<\/p>\n Easy readings of Critchlow\u2019s paintings might throw up buzzwords like reclamation or body positivity, but Critchlow said her work was about neither. \u201cBecause of the politics around being Black and being a woman,\u201d she said, there\u2019s some need to see it \u201cfrom a purely positive positioning \u2014 this need for it to be pure and good.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Look closely enough, and you\u2019ll see that there\u2019s a sinister quality to her paintings \u2014 a dark humor and absurdity in the way that, at times, the women appear just as menacing as they are beautiful.<\/p>\n There are of course erotic undertones in her work, too. Her figures appear in tantalizing positions, with captivated gazes inspired by Black porn magazines from the 1960s and \u201970s.<\/p>\n Hilton Als, the New Yorker critic who recently curated an exhibition of Critchlow\u2019s drawings<\/a> at Maximillian William called \u201cTriple Threat,\u201d is a longtime champion of her work. In an essay for her first solo show at a U.S. institution, at the Flag Art Foundation in 2023, he wrote<\/a> that \u201cCritchlow\u2019s figures are forceful entities, often alive in their pleasure and the pleasure of being looked at.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n What\u2019s clear is that these women are not being voyeuristically observed nor deliberately seductive, but are participants in the act of being seen. \u201cI paint these women,\u201d Critchlow said, \u201cbut I never feel like they\u2019re complacent\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, her paintings seem to be about making the private public, and rebelling against ideas of purity to explore dark curiosities about the body.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Critchlow said that lately, she had been thinking about why Vel\u00e1zquez \u2014 the 17th-century Spanish artist with some masterpieces in the Dulwich Picture Gallery collection \u2014 didn\u2019t paint more conventionally attractive people. \u201cHe looked at the dwarfs in the court,\u201d she said, \u201cwith as much lust and intrigue\u201d as people expect a painter to find in \u201cmore beautiful women.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes, in order to understand something,\u201d she said, \u201cyou almost need to go where it\u2019s off limits.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the English artist Somaya Critchlow was at art school around a decade ago, she once showed a tutor a painting she had made of her cousins sitting on a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":458,"featured_media":3309,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[223,4353,221,4350,4360,4355,4,113,222,4352,4357,4356,4351,4358,4359,4354],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n