ARTISTS
Vanessa Raw: On Earth We Weren't Meant To Stay
Vanessa Raw paints abundant natural scenes that centre female pleasure and kinship. On Earth We Weren鈥檛 Meant to Stay at Carl Freedman Gallery Gallery (30th June to 8th September 2024) depicts groups of nude women exploring one another鈥檚 bodies, lounging, licking and cuddling.
There are moments of both heated passion and tender devotion, as her women, cocooned within the safe solitude of luscious fields and forests, intimately connect. The British artist鈥檚 paintings are immersive in scale and colour, inviting the viewer into vast paradisal compositions formed from fluid marks of vibrant green, blue and lilac. Her settings create a sense of containment for the women within them, with branches, leaves and brushstrokes producing a rounded canopy in which they seem to have privacy from the outside world.
This is a therapeutic practice for Raw, who revels in every inch of her subjects and explores her own relationship with love and intimacy through these charged paintings. The works offer a potential space of healing for the artist, her viewers and models, inviting a liberated relationship with the body, away from the male gaze and at times violent shaming of social judgement.
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Vanessa Raw paints abundant natural scenes that centre female pleasure and kinship. On Earth We Weren鈥檛 Meant to Stay at Carl Freedman Gallery Gallery (30th June to 8th September 2024) depicts groups of nude women exploring one another鈥檚 bodies, lounging, licking and cuddling.
There are moments of both heated passion and tender devotion, as her women, cocooned within the safe solitude of luscious fields and forests, intimately connect. The British artist鈥檚 paintings are immersive in scale and colour, inviting the viewer into vast paradisal compositions formed from fluid marks of vibrant green, blue and lilac. Her settings create a sense of containment for the women within them, with branches, leaves and brushstrokes producing a rounded canopy in which they seem to have privacy from the outside world.
This is a therapeutic practice for Raw, who revels in every inch of her subjects and explores her own relationship with love and intimacy through these charged paintings. The works offer a potential space of healing for the artist, her viewers and models, inviting a liberated relationship with the body, away from the male gaze and at times violent shaming of social judgement.
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