Georgina Gratrix: Show me your dancing (female)
Gratrix, Georgina (b 1982)
Show me your dancing (female) - 2008
Oil on Fabriano, board, canvas and found items
280 x 90 cm
Certificate of Authentication
In ancient Rome, the festival of Saturnalia was an ecstatic week of banqueting, gambling and general licentiousness. For the duration of carnival time, the social order was inverted, and masters and slaves
could temporarily switch roles. In Medieval times, this tradition morphed into the Feast of Fools, a carnival over a number of days during which peasants switched places with the aristocracy, dressing up in their clothes and mimicking their highbrow habits. […] Serious aesthetics, in this festival, are also out of the window. Subjects are represented by analogy, rather than descriptive mark; […] Show me your Dancing and Show me your Feelings, two larger than life nudes, are cobbled together from canvasses, ironically badly painted paper limbs and assemblage genitalia (a pair of spectacles and a puny plastic penis for the man, an inverted painting of a mountain, complete with forest, and tiny figures walking through it, for the woman).
Katharine Jacobs, Georgina Gratrix at Whatiftheworld / Gallery, Artthrob
Archive: Issue No. 134, October 2008