Private View: Saturday 28th October 2023, 5-7pm
West Palm Beach (Florida, USA)
Gargantuan women – or is it one woman, multiple versions of a self? – appear dancing, cross-legged or reclining against soft coloured, bruising surfaces. Their huge bodies dominate the space, in poses that are both challenging and awkward, joyous and searching. The British artist and former fashion designer Sara Berman refers to this character as an avatar or surrogate. She bears a physical resemblance to Berman and inevitably captures the artist’s moods and movements across the canvas, but at the same time, she is a figure to be moulded and dressed. No Visible Means of Support, Berman’s second solo exhibition with Kristin Hjellegjerde gallery and the inaugural show at the gallery’s West Palm Beach location, presents a powerful new body of work that emerged from a period of personal struggle and transformation. These resulting paintings are some of Berman’s largest to date as well as her most vulnerable and exuberant.
Each painting begins with the diamond pattern motif of the harlequin. When portrayed as male, the harlequin is a lovable joker, but the same character as a woman becomes, in Berman’s words, ‘a trickster whore’. For the artist, this character encapsulates a familiar double standard but also speaks to the social and cultural roles that women are expected to perform. As such, the diamond pattern applied a base layer on to the canvas becomes the dark underbelly of each portrait, which Berman then works over with layers of paint. This is not, however, a process of obliteration but rather a wrestling with self – as Berman wipes and scrapes at the surface, the harlequin rises up once more, revealing itself as a kind of mottled, shimmering skin. However, while previous works offered only the slightest glimpse of the motif, these new paintings are more brazen. The diamond pattern is a falling shadow in the background as well as a prominent feature, in Cowgirls, Afterglow and What Part of NO Don’t You Understand, of the character’s clothing. It’s a form of exposure but one that is defiant and proud.
Significantly, it is not just the motif that has been exposed but also the character’s body. Berman previously flattened the garments that she painted, removing the folds and seams of the fabric to create rigid shapes that simultaneously contained and abstracted the body. In these works, clothing and accessories are still a form of armour – most obviously in Old Man’s Balls where the character holds a spiky bunch of Gomphocarpus physocarpus as a kind of weapon or shield in front of her chest – but they are also a costumes, a tool for play and experimentation. In Cowgirls and Tank Girl, she wears a pair of boy’s leopard print shorts and white cowboy boots; in Dirty Wanker the figure appears in a wide-legged stance clutching the skirt of a pink dress with ruffled shoulders; and in Afterglow, she lies back, head tilted, legs akimbo while her skirt dissolves around her into a fluorescent froth of glittering pixels.
But for all their apparent softness, these paintings are the process of a hard-won battle. We see it in the figure’s variously challenging expressions, her confronting scale and the visible bruising leftover from Berman’s violent painting process, but the struggle is most clearly captured in the video work Trickster Whore. Here, Berman steps into her paintings: she becomes the harlequin and what we witness is both the pain and pleasure of that transformation. ‘It really speaks to what’s going on behind the paintings,’ says Berman.
No Visible Means of Support may sound like a lamentation, but it is really a statement of self-empowerment and affirmation. As Berman puts it: ‘This work is about me coming out fighting for my position in the world.’
