Keith Farquhar: More Nudes in Colour, Glasgow

Issue 50, May 2011. See the entire magazine online here.

Tramway, Glasgow
18 February – 27 March

By Susannah Thompson

More Nudes in Colour is the latest outing for Keith Farquhar’s ‘flat-pack statues’, works which combine a revisionist approach to the art-historical trope of the nude with a reassessment of the language of sculpture in the digital age.

Beginning in the studio, Farquhar covers the bodies of life models in the painterly, gestural manner of Abstract Expressionism and Yves Klein’s Anthropométries. The torsos of the figures (echoing Magritte’s La Représentation of 1937) are then photographed and the resulting digital files emailed to a company specialising in lifesize cardboard cutouts of celebrities, seen most frequently as cinema lobby cards or comic-book shop window displays. The final cutouts are then mailed back to the artist, ready for self-assembly and display on accompanying flat-pack plinths. These print-on-demand statues could be seen, then, as a kind of monumental mail-art, easily transported and circulated.

Though the series could now be seen to have ‘done the rounds’, the Nudes are a relatively recent direction for Farquhar. Yet aspects of the artist’s broader oeuvre are present: the irreverent titles of the Nudes (Marble Arse, Purple Tuft, Bare Bum, Blue Sky, all 2010) are characteristic of the artist’s love of puns and sixth-form wit, while the careful placement of the works in the gallery is typical of Farquhar’s interest in sculptural ‘staging’.

The undoubted strength of More Nudes in Colour is in its unswerving focus on the visual. The works are arranged in a perfect circle, pulling the viewer into the kaleidoscopic centre; colour, meanwhile, dazzles, activating a kind of push/ pull between the ‘fact’ of the flatness of the works and the illusion of depth created through the viscosity and tactility of paint impastoed, poured, streaked and wiped across bare skin. The resulting patterns suggest trompe l’oeil effects in which the surface of the body resembles other natural materials such as wood or marble.

Though formally proplike, these works stand resolutely in opposition to modes of art in which lightweight structures are designed to support flimsy conceptualism, yet it’s through the mise en scène that a myriad of broader cultural references are elicited. On an immediate level the guillotined limbs and heads of the Nudes seem to refer to neoclassical sculpture, but the fact that the vast majority of the torsos belong to young women invites an engagement with feminist discourse, notably the sociopolitical implications (ie, containment, framing) of visual devices such as cropping, fracture and fragmentation which have dominated representations of the female body in art for centuries.

Ultimately, the works offer much to consider in terms of the interplay between, for instance, traditional sculptural forms and digital technology, but as a literal and symbolic ‘body’ of work, an acknowledgement of gender seems strangely silent in terms of how the works have been critically contextualised – these are, after all, most obviously images of ‘the body in pieces’. Likewise, a sloshy porn aesthetic is heavily implied through the ‘wet and messy’ imagery of paint on skin. Perhaps it’s through this ambiguity towards gender – whether intentional or not – that the viewer is offered the most fruitful space to interrogate and reflect on what these colourful nudes might signify in a broader cultural context.

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