20/07/2018 Severine Grosjean
The place of women in society has undergone transformations in many areas.
Monika Furmana, a Lithuanian painter, is a committed artist, whose work is characterized by immense canvases, and which constitutes the portrait of today’s women reality, who are in love with freedom but locked in the shackles of society. The woman is exposed beyond the moral and social conditions.
The artist deconstructs the woman’s body, changing her identity. The relationship between the object and the body is important in Furmana’s painting, in which the body is hidden in the object, where the woman is joined with a cyborg: it is the woman-machine, the woman and her body penetrated by the story that accumulates as a burden .
At all times, women were objects of fascination. In fact, we have always tried to unravel the mystery that surrounds them. Her image, which has been so worked over the centuries, has never really coincided with reality, neither in the past nor in the present. Sometimes they can be represented as an adored and inspiring muse, who is considered as an end in itself, and sometimes as a defamed and neglected object, which is merely seen as a means. It is possible to say that the image of women has almost never belonged to them. With humor and provocation, Monika Furmana exposes this duality in her latest work “Eat Myself, Drink Myself”
Inspired by “The Birth of Venus” by Botticelli, whose qualities include love, beauty, desire, sex, fertility, prosperity and victory, Monika Furmana creates her own Venus. Botticelli offers an archetype of beauty in the characteristics of a young blonde with long hair, clear skin and appropriate measures. Monika’s has no identity, leaving the face of her character hidden. She has a television and a camera in her hands. Her image is formed by the media or advertising and no longer by religion.
Monika paints large bodies of decomposed or reconstructed women where their body is possessed by technology. The viewer is faced by her ideas, in which she describes the specificities that inhabit the morality between the public and the private. Her female character is full of irrepressible anger, which pushes her to an independent life.
The women of Monika Furman are reminiscent of the manga heroines. She inserts heroines of the fantasy world, where they play a key role in the main story. In some of her paintings, the erotic character is more pronounced as in her work entitled “MotherFucker”. Her heroine in a sadistic machisme style makes love with the world that surrounds her and does not hide her pleasure. The female Fata is a typical character who uses the power of sexuality to trap. In short, a fatal woman is a woman whose power of seduction is irresistible. She is like the spider woman, as Monika Furmana has portrayed in “Black Widow.” The woman with 8 legs and interspersed with popular codes, such as the Spider-Man’s arm, has a special place in the human imagination, especially due to her practice of sexual cannibalism. In a sign of happiness and unhappiness, women are a description of the disturbing strangeness of Monika Furmana.
In her latest work, Monika is interested in the current representation of the cyborg that confirms the idea of this postmodern body, which is free from the opposition between genres. The representation of the female body revealed by the painter exploits the differences between the sexes to define a new kind of humanity. She transgresses and redistributes values in fictitious social universes. It can also be observed how the robot or cyborg woman allows Monika to combine in the same image the idea of sweetness and innocence of a woman with the destructive power of the machine. They end up revealing to be warriors behind the apparent delicacy of their bodies. This balance of power and domination between the human and the machine evokes the relationship between man and woman. The cyborg is the figure of a future open to ambiguities and differences.
In different paintings, Monika creates an entity where the image of the body is constructed from the appearance and words of the Other, showing something fragile and dependent. In many paintings, Monika Furmana, by using objects of light or representation (camera, television), shows how the feminine identity is still reduced to the image; in other words, how women remain captive of the mirror. She asks herself about what “being a woman” means, reexamining the looks and the discourses that retain her image and sexualize her.
The woman is an angel between construction and destruction!
Partnership: The Nomad Creative Projects
