Vanessa Raw’s latest show at the Rubell Museum in Miami celebrates a few firsts for the English painter. In her first US solo and institutional exhibition, This is How the Light Gets In forwards a new gender politic, summoning her own kind of Eden along the way. Expanding on past explorations and femininity and desire, Raw’s welcomes viewers into her skin-clad dream.
Across a suite of works commissioned for the museum’s artist-in-residence program, Raw welcomes a cast of women, languidly lounging in sun-soaked scenes, brought to life by layers of color. The artist constructs in “earthly paradise” where her figures become one with each other and the world around them.
There’s a sense of surreal beauty embedded within these paintings as entanglements of flesh signal beyond sexuality, into realms of vulnerability and purity. “As a woman painting women, I’m automatically creating work for a female gaze,” she tells curator and muse Destinee Ross-Sutton in an interview with CULTURED. “I imagine and situate my subjects in places of safety and I genuinely feel love for the women I paint. I hope that shines through. When I use found imagery, there’s a transformation process from male to female gaze, which transforms the feeling associated with the image. I take back the power.”
Having spent over a decade as an olympic triathlete, art and athleticism become one on Raw's canvases. As bodies bend and bleed into one another, a meditative power emerges. Steeped in energy of community and the lush landscapes that surround them, the artist nurtures a newfound gaze where to be soft is to be strong.
This is How the Light Gets In is now on view at the Rubell Museum in Miami.
Rubell Museum
1100 NW 23rd St,
Miami, FL 33127
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