2023
Her
2023
acrylic, spray paint, marker, crayon, oil pastel on canvas
250 x 230 cm x 2
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The work is inspired by Scylla, the six-headed sea monster from the Odyssey, who hides in her lair and snatches men from passing ships. In later mythology, she is portrayed as a beautiful nereid who is turned into a monster by a jealous goddess, after Poseidon fell in love with her: Scylla’s genitals and lower body become a mass of mad dogs. In this diptych, the idea of the twisting, swirling man-eater amid the waves is combined with a gigantic ship screw from a modern-day industrial shipyard, which looked like a monumental sculpture with metallic ripples and iridescent scales.
The title refers not only to the female demon, but to the movie ‘Her’ where a bodiless AI voice becomes a real woman in the heart of the male protagonist. The painting turns this immaterial female identity (who is fixated on human interests and only exists through language communication) into its opposite: An overwhelming material being that only exists through physical actions, without any connection to its human prey, like a natural predator.
