Artistellar is pleased to present ‘The Body Is a Landscape’ - a duo exhibition of Oriele Steiner and Jeanine Brito. The exhibition illustrates the exploration of a woman’s body as a landscape. In the same way, one wonders about and explores the features of a landscape; the human body is an immense field of exploration. While Jeanine Brito’s paintings examine the ambiguous concept of the feminised body, Oriele Steiner offers an insightful portrayal of sensuality and multiplicity of the female form.
Historically, the ideals of a woman’s body, regardless of culture or continent, have been laid out almost exclusively by men. More than any evolutionary determinism, this fact has meant that a narrow range of attributes resurfaces across eras. As part of more general democratisation of image consumption and production, women themselves began redefining the ideals they aspire to.
Both Brito and Steiner welcome the expanding notions and exploration of female beauty and use them to create complex compositions echoing these issues about femininity while rejecting the stereotyping of female bodies. Jeanine Brito’s static arrangements juxtapose female bodies and feminine objects with raw pieces of meat to communicate the satirical contrast between them. The human body in her work functions as a mere part of the composition, working in tandem with the rest of the objects in the painting without being given more attention. Meanwhile, Oriele Steiner uses grotesquely colourful figures to create unsettling parallels between landscapes and human bodies. Their anamorphic shapes echo each other on her canvases. This allows surreal compositions to be filled with various conflicting emotions. ‘The Body is a Landscape’ offers a contemporary exploration of the female body and hopes to inspire its viewers the same way a landscape would.
