3 artists

Marina Abramovic, Frida Kahlo, and Cui Xiuwen

Abramovic uses her body as the subject in her works. Her works are mainly photos of her body or exhibits where she is the art and is testing the endurance/limits of her body. Her work is interesting because every piece seems to convey a different expression, as if she is almost trying to capture that. While flipping through the set of 20 images of her works, the varying scenarios ranged from crying as if one’s heart is broken to two people screaming in a heated debate into each other’s mouths to another that shows the two in a full blown make out session. These works seem to tell a story but also have other works spacing them out, like a photo of her in military garb in the middle of children dressed the same. In this work however, the artist seems out of place. She is the only person wearing shoes, is the biggest person in the work, and is the only person to not have a gun. The work leaves the viewer questioning what the message behind it really is. Many of her other works also do this, such as one where she is lying on the floor cut up with the message in blood saying both art and artists need to be beautiful. She is making a deliberate contradiction because she is taking her attractive form and cutting herself apart to make it become “ugly” and challenge the idea of beauty.

Frida Kahlo’s work comes mostly in the form of self portraits. Her work is infused with her heritage and surrealism. The work displays ethnic costuming and strong cultural traits. The strong eyebrows are one of these traits. In many of the works the person can be a man or woman, either way they are self confident in themselves. She is what stands out in the work, not the abstract background, the animals, and the costumes. She has a sense of power; the viewer’s eye is drawn to her immediately. All the works seem to have a strong sense of contrast. I get a sense of fantasy but at the same time, realize she is exposing her past to us like showing events of her life that made her stronger.

Cui Xiuwen uses a model, rather than herself, as the subject in creating works. Her works seem to focus more on the young, Chinese, vulnerable woman. One of her series is about a pregnant woman. Almost all of her works take on a sexual, whimsical nature. She likes to play with angles and layers of her pieces; she will have the same model in one work over a dozen times. It is almost like she is using the model to create at pattern on the work for the viewer’s eye to follow. This artist will play with proportions and make the body parts all different sizes as a way of finding new ways to look at the body.

All these women create strong works of art, but they all have different styles. Abramovic is a performer/digital artist. She performs at many museum exhibits and displays photography. Her work expresses raw emotion and leaves the viewer unsure of what is actually going on in the work. Frida Kahlo also has this feeling due to the surreal aspects of her works like a head within a head, her face on an animal body, and other odd things. She justified this by saying that, “I do not paint dreams… I paint my reality” (from the Frida Kahlo official site). Most of her works are oil paintings, and they are self portraits. Her work is more abstract than the other two and has the most cultural traits in the work.

In all the works Kahlo’s face is very similar and strong, yet she seems to show only one self confident strong emotion. The last artist is Cui Xiuwen, she works mostly with photography and video. This makes her more like Abramovic medium wise. However, she, unlike the other two, uses a model rather than herself in creating the art, so she puts herself in a different category. Also, she uses lots of Chinese architecture in the background, so that shows, in some way, her work is similar to Kahlo who also uses architecture sometimes. Xiuwen is different from the other two artists because she doesn’t try to make the model appear strong. She does the opposite. The model appears young and vulnerable. Almost all of her work has a sexual theme and deals with some aspect of beauty. All of these artists throughout their career have questioned beauty. Abramovic went with cutting herself apart to make a statement to question whether the artist and art has to be beautiful in order to be art. Kahlo shows us that the dark strong eyebrows/unibrow can be beautiful or how one can over come a car accident and that too can be beautiful. Then, Xiuwen shows us that pregnancy can be elegant and serene.