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In So this was her kingdom…, titled after a quotation from Canadian author Marian Engel’s controversial erotic novel Bear (1976), in which a lonely female librarian engages in a sexual relationship with a bear, Tracy Midulla uses white paint to conceal all but the eyes and hands found in a small print of Raphael’s Self-Portrait with a Friend from the High Renaissance.
Though seemingly disparate references, like the protagonist in Bear, Raphael is also said to have nurtured a secret forbidden love affair, and, according to Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari, it was Raphael’s sexual appetite “with no sense of moderation” that resulted in his untimely death.
Midulla’s work, in its economy, offers viewers the opportunity to contemplate the gaze and gestures of the original painting while making their own inferences on to whom the eyes and hands belong, their genders, and their relationship to one another. Underneath the mask of hazy white paint exists infinite scenarios and implications. Perhaps there is a banal interaction between two friends; perhaps a room full of books and a bear.Label Type
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In So this was her kingdom…, titled after a quotation from Marian Engel’s novel Bear (1976) in which a lonely female librarian engages in a sexual relationship with a bear, Tracy Midulla uses white paint to conceal all but the eyes and hands found in a small print of Raphael’s Self-Portrait. Midulla’s work, in its economy, offers viewers the opportunity to contemplate the gaze and gestures of the original painting while making their own inferences on to whom the eyes and hands belong, their genders, and their relationship to one another. Underneath the mask of hazy white paint exists infinite scenarios and implications. Perhaps there is a banal interaction between two friends; perhaps a room full of books and a bear.