The Kunstverein Hamburg Shows the Works Of Evelyne Axelle

Written by Zelig Dickenschädel Wednesday, 12 October 2011 21:33

Hamburg.- The Kunstverein Hamburg presents "Evelyn Axelle: The World is Round" until June 13th. Evelyne Axell (1935-1972) was an actress and newsreader, an icon in the French-speaking world, and for many, her beauty made her a sex symbol. But in 1963 she brought her film and television career to an end, reversing roles to become a painter. A key figure in Belgian pop art, she is among the artists whose work is just emerging from the shadow cast by male pop heroes for reassessment, for instance in the exhibitions "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958—1968" at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of the University of the Arts, Philadelphia last winter or "Power Up—Female Pop Art" at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, as well in recent publications.

Axell experimented with various contemporary materials, combining plexiglas with enamel, with synthetic fur, foils, etc. to create substantively and visually seductive pictures. Her unusual material aesthetics combines mass-produced materials previously in advertising and industry rather than in the arts, which to some extent required considerable manual crafting. Axell used half-transparent plexiglas, painting sometimes on the front and sometimes on the reverse side in staggered compositions producing an interplay of transparent and opaque surfaces. The principal figures are usually women, often nude and not infrequently, representing the artist, sometimes as a direct self-portrait, sometimes indirectly, where she posed for photos that provided the basis for her paintings. Her art thus revolves around her own person and the image of woman, and lays claim to an impetus for liberation. The self-chosen nudity affirms the pinup, rendering it a positive ex-pression of female sexuality and self-determination.



Born on 16 August 1935 in Namur, Belgium, Evelyne Axell (née Devaux) was born into a traditional, middle-class Catholic family. After graduating high school, she studied pottery at the Namur School of Art in 1953. In 1954, she switched to drama school and quickly began a promising career as an actress and television presenter. In 1956, she married Belgian film director Jean Antoine, who specialized in art documentaries for Belgian television. She decided to change her name to Evelyne Axell for the purposes of her acting career, which her husband encouraged. In 1963, she wrote and starred in the provocative film 'Le Crocodile en peluche', directed by her husband. In 1964, Axell quit her promising acting career to pursue painting. She enlisted Surrealist painter René Magritte, a family friend of Antoine's, to be her artistic mentor. Axell visited with Magritte twice a month for a whole year, during which time he helped her improve her oil painting technique. At the same time, Antoine embarked on a series of documentaries devoted to Pop Art and Nouveau Realisme. Axell went with Antoine to London for filming and met Allen Jones, Peter Phillips, Pauline Boty, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, and Joe Tilson. Inspired by these studio visits, Axell created her own style of Pop art, becoming one of the first Belgian artists to experiment within this avant-garde idiom. Although Belgian collectors were interested in her work, private galleries were resistant to showing her paintings. At this time she started to use the androgynous name "Axell" professionally, in the hopes that she would be taken seriously as an artist despite her gender, youth, and beauty, not to mention the explicit sexual nature of her work.

In 1966, her Erotomobiles paintings won an honorable mention in the Young Painters Prize. In early 1967, she had her first solo exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Shortly thereafter, she stopped using oil on canvas and began painting plastic, first clartex and later plexiglas, with auto enamel. This new method became her signature technique, which she showed for the first time at an exhibition at the Galerie Contour in Brussels in the fall of 1967. In 1969 she won the Young Belgian Painters Prize, no small feat for a female artist at that time. She organized a few elicit happenings as she continued to make increasingly erotic paintings. In 1970 she painted "The Painter (Self-Portrait)" said to be the first painting in which a woman painted herself naked and as an artist. Critic Pierre Restany commented, "The Belgian painter Evelyne Axell has joined the company of womanpower's art, with Niki de Saint Phalle from France, Yayoi Kusama from Japan, Marisol from Venezuela - and the list goes on. These women are living their sexual revolution as real women, with all the direct, unsurprising consequences: the other side is taking the initiative." In 1972 Axell visited her uncle's family in Guatemala, where she became enamored with the landscape and vowed to return. But her life and career were unexpectedly cut short in a tragic car crash outside of Gent, Belgium. Axell died in the early morning of 10 September 1972.

The Kunstverein in Hamburg is one of the oldest art societies in Germany. Since 1817 it has dedicated itself to presenting young, contemporary art. Back in 1826 it was quick to display the talents of the up-and-coming Caspar David Friedrich, exhibiting his works “The Tomb of Ulrich von Hutten” and “The Sea of Ice”, and later presented solo exhibitions by budding artists Arnold Böcklin (1898), Jackson Pollock (1958), Francis Bacon (1965) and Angela Bulloch (1994). Rather than housing a permanent collection, the Kunstverein hosts temporary exhibitions in order to remain flexible and able to react to contemporary art trends and social issues, which it explores from an aesthetic perspective. This work is supported by the broad-ranging commitment of its members, and their financial contributions and interest in contemporary art form the basis of both the Kunstverein’s long tradition and its future. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.kunstverein.de

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~