Venus (I)
Venus (I)
Category: Paintings
Artist: Chris Gollon
Subject: Early Thoughts
Year of Work: 2008
Media: acrylic on canvas
Size: 36" x 24"
£4,500. To purchase this work, or for further information, please contact: IAP Fine Art, London. T: 0844 561 1833.
This painting is part of the series entitled 'Early Thoughts' and is also in the exhibition 'Gods, Angels & Souls' (see Exhibitions page). In preparation for his Fellowship & Residency at the Institute of Advanced Study in early 2009, Chris Gollon began six months before to explore his own general idea and early thoughts on the Fellowship's theme: 'Being Human'.
With Apollo, Chris started to look at the gods mankind has created, and those who like Apollo got left behind, as civilizations changed. In a similar fashion, he has painted Venus 3 times, and one painting also as the end of love or life entitled 'And in the End'.
Despite the face covering, she seems to be looking at us, or striding toward us with vitality, as Gollon's previous Apollo, like a superhuman being, if not a god. The colours on her body are very beautiful as is the paintwork and flesh tones of her thighs. The vagina is not as realistic as Courbet's famous 'The Origin of the World', but has that same mysterious power.
Chris Gollon has developed a very unique and stylized anatomy in these figures, using a large degree of abstraction, yet retaining some degree of the representational. It imbues these figures with a strange but sculptural 'essence' of Woman or humankind. This technique is helped him develop a way of using figures like these to describe ideas, as he prepared for the 'Being Human' Fellowship.
