Jennifer Huang Box Hill South VIC Rückenfigur pencil and watercolour on paper Jennifer Huang, a Melbourne-based artist, has drawn the world around her for as long as she can remember. This love for working from life is foundational to her art practice, alongside a respect for process, craft, and deep research. Inspired both by her lifelong exposure to Chinese visual culture and a profound engagement with the work of the European Old Masters, she hopes to invite her audience to share a moment of quiet intensity with her work. In Rückenfigur, the artist’s own body is observed with mirrors and drawn from life. The title alludes to the Western painting tradition of portraying figures with backs turned to the viewer: inviting empathy and identification on the one hand, but also creating a psychologically enclosed space, private and mysterious, within the image. The artist approaches the female nude as an un-idealised self-portrait and a synthesis of paradoxes: defiance and shame; vulnerability and proud strength; passion and deep repose. In the making of this work, she utilised an intuitive drawing approach, layering both additive and subtractive techniques and employing wet and dry media to sculpt form from pigment. Solid flesh forms and dissolves on the paper surface as if in mountain mists: a territory both viscerally familiar and completely unknown.
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