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| ◄ PRESS |
It's not as if painter Annie Kevans was suffering from a lack of interest in those devastatingly spare and downy portraits she paints - her entire St Martins' BA show was famously bought up in one job lot three years ago and she has attracted ongoing further attention not least as a star of 'Anticipation', the central London group show that attracted so much notice last week. But it looks like her recent solo exhibition of new works has pretty much cemented the rise to stardom. 'Swans' opened last Thursday in Portobello Road. Its curator, the ubiquitous Flora Fairbairn, told me that it "went really well and pretty much sold out - including lots of paintings that we had in the store room that weren't in the show. Annie did so well that she's resigned from her job as a secretary!" This is true; Kevans, a relatively late starter who enrolled at St Martins for her BA in Painting when she was 24, could finally resign from her part-time pay-the-rent job thanks to the backing of Fairbairn's ArtWork Productions and this sell out show. 'Swans' is inspired by the reality TV show in America of the same name, whose producers creepily took it upon themselves to remodel and revamp plain young girls, or 'Ugly Ducklings,' into surgically enhanced, aesthetically acceptable 'Swans'. What perturbs Kevans most about this so-called transformation is that the people who take part actually believe that it's a radical step they are taking, that it will help them feel better, whereas really she sees "the startlingly identical clones that emerge as only the ugly progeny of Society's apparent obsession with youth and beauty". Obsessed with the notion of self-invention, particularly as it manifests itself in America, Kevans has followed this ideal of the American Dream by researching many real life stories of children who have found themselves (or put themselves) in an adult world.
Then there's a rather odd set of paintings of the most recognisable adult faces in America. George Bush, saucer-eyed, as a little boy, Martha Stewart as a little girl, Oprah Winfrey as a little girl. They are a nod to the series of 2006 paintings in which Kevans painted boyhood portraits of history's most notorious dictators. I wondered if these were interpretations on Annie's part? "No, I take a number of different real images of a person then paint my mind's amalgamation of them. It was easy with George Bush as there is an official George W Bush website where the uncensored photos are posted, but it was almost impossible to find images of Stewart or Winfrey. Martha Stewart was once a model and Oprah Winfrey was once Miss Black Tennessee. It seems that they have wanted to transform their image to such a degree that they have possibly employed people to work fulltime scouring the internet for any stray postings. It took me ages to find any. I'm fascinated how these super powerful people were once beauty queens, and how they find that somehow shameful." The silent films of the 1920s is next to receive the Kevans treatment. "'Vamps and Innocents' will be my next show opening in Vienna: the portraits will be of the '20s female movie stars who were forced to either play the role of the virgin or the whore." |
Saatchi Online 12 June 2007
by Laura K Jones |
"I'm enthralled by this
public fascination with eternal youth, beauty and fame," says Kevans.
"By the gap that exists between one's aspirations and reality."
She's also included a watery,
flesh-toned portrait of Doreen Tracey:
child of famous vaudeville actors Sidney Tracey and Bessie Hay.
"Doreen Tracey's biography could be read as the classic story of the
downfall of an American sweetheart. Most recognized for her role as
a child star in the original Mickey Mouse Club where all-singing,
all-dancing actors provided shining examples for the American youth,
Doreen was last seen posing, legs spread-wide and wearing only her
ears from her Mouseketeer costume in Playboy magazine".