Piotr Uklański

Suicide Stunners’ Séance
 

Belmont Chapel - Island Cemetery, Newport

July 3rd through September 20th 2020

Piotr Uklański’s Suicide Stunners’ Séance, is an exhibition of new paintings of historical and fictional heroines installed in the Belmont Chapel at the Island Cemetery in Newport, RI. Inspired by the Neo-Gothic architecture and history of the 19th century chapel, Uklański has created a body of work that conjures the women who were the unsung protagonists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—an artists society founded in London in 1848 that opposed academic painting’s emphasis on the High Renaissance in favor of resurrecting Italian 15th century art and narratives laden with suggestions of the occult and layered sexuality. Uklański presents slyly reconsidered portraits of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Siddall, Jane Morris, Emma Jones, Annie Miller, and others who served as the muses and models for the all-male Pre-Raphaelites, whose depictions focused upon tragic mythological and literary figures.  

With the body of work in Suicide Stunners’ Séance, Uklański again harnesses the tactic of appropriation for which his conceptual practice has achieved critical acclaim, building upon past projects that confront tropes of dominant visual culture.  Now borrowing from Pre-Raphaelite compositions, Uklański shifts how the female figures appear as manifestations of male desire and fantasy in the original paintings. Uklański’s works disrupt the view of the Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood as a group of objectified muses. His striking paintings bare their authorial positions as cultural contributors and formidable figures of art history in their own right.  

“The women in Piotr’s paintings have minds of their own,” says Dodie Kazanjian, founding director of Art&Newport.  “This takes on added relevance in 2020, the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote in this country.  And let’s not forget that Newport’s Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, whose husband was August Belmont’s son, played a key role in the women’s suffrage movement.”  

To view checklist click here

To view installation photographs of the show please, click here.