Canadian artist Sara Cwynar’s 72 Pictures of Modern Painting is a wallpaper piece she has made by collating 72 modern artworks from the 1900s. These are pieces by artists such as Lichtenstein, Picasso, Pollock and many more which have been deliberately chosen and mashed together to show how women of the time were depicted. By doing so, Cwynar has created a commentary on how modern art, mostly of European origins from over a hundred years ago, have come to shape our ideas of what ideal beauty is to this very day.
The final piece was deliberately made a wallpaper, a piece of interior decor that is considered background to a room, to reflect on how the depicted beauty standards of the time have become something that people can build up on instead of a final whole, when creating their perception of women’s beauty. In fact, whenever Cwynar displays the piece, she displays her other pieces on top of it. By doing so, Cwynar is boldly stating that today, people have the option to think of these Western beauty standards as background information, a specific part of history that society can finally move on from. Cwynar is calling for the inclusion of people of colour, acknowledging that there is a need for intersectional feminism on all spheres, including when it comes to society’s perception of what is beautiful. This is why the piece is a safe space to reflect on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Gender Equality.
To create the wallpaper, Cwynar first began by collecting the images she would like to collate from major encyclopedia books. These are depictions of women by some of the world’s most renowned modern paintings as per Western art history canons, such as Picasso, Francis Bacon, Matisse, Seurat, Malevich and many more, all of whom were European men. Cwynar then created reproductions of their paintings by scanning them, making sure to include whatever stains and printing errors were visible on the book pages. By preserving these marks from physical encyclopedias, Cwynar has added yet another layer of symbolism. Here, Cwynar is affirming the antiquated nature of these beauty standards, as they have been pulled from the pages of an encyclopedia, the byproduct of a long gone information age that existed without the luxury of the internet.
Through 72 Pictures of Modern Paintings, Cwynar deconstructs the idealized representations of women perpetuated by modern art. She challenges her viewers to interrogate the historical roots of beauty and consider more realistic alternatives, options that instead are intersectional and empowering.
Find out more about 72 Pictures of Modern Paintings and Sara Cwynar’s other pieces by checking her website www.saracwynar.com or Instagram @cwynars.