 |
|
| |
adriane strampp |
|
| |
|
|
|
Adriane Strampp was born in USA, educated in UK and later, Australia where she completed a BA in Fine Art. Over the years Strampp has traveled regularly to Italy, selecting much of her subject-matter from the works of well-known Renaissance artists, such as, Bronzino, Titian and Bellini, due to their fluid imagery, sensuous colour and romantic idealism. |
|
| |
During the Renaissance period in art there occurred an abundant representation of saints and sinners, angels and virgins and yet such allusions to the spiritual realm were equally a celebration of the worldly pleasures which accompanied the rise of individualism. In the same way Strampp’s appropriation of the past, and its rhythmic re-assemblage, reflects this celebration of the material world whilst at the same time contemplating mortality and fallen ideals. Ironically, it is through a deconstructive strategy - as her fragmented narrative incorporates close-up details, slices of Renaissance figures and mechanisms of blockage, that the viewer is provided with the poetic space to complete the picture and experience the timelessness of mortal desire. |
|
| |
In the current era of accelerated consumerism temporal confusion reigns as we are disconnected from the present - restlessly striving toward a ‘better’ and unreachable future whilst, at the same time, experiencing the past as obscured. It becomes possible to understand Strampp’s motivations as she freely appropriates from history - transporting unrequited hopes, dreams and desires across the centuries and into the present. The often disregarded details of appropriated historical narratives are brought to the fore and, at the same time, Strampp blocks our entry into these narratives: revealing and obscuring, juxtaposing crosses and rich patterns, whilst cursive text, appropriated from favoured poems, skip across the canvas. |
|
| |
Strampp presents the complexity and contradiction inherent to any debate in which ideals are held against reality and in her early work ideals are challenged as mere façades. Empty dresses against empty backgrounds, evolving from the idealised contemporary |
|
|
 |
|
| wedding dress to armour-like bodices, and more recently transformed to flat patterns, as barely distinguishable traces of the original works. |
|
| Strampp’s dress series as a whole represents a timeless journey of desire, loss and acceptance - from idealised symbolism to the inevitable mesh of ideals and reality. In her more recent work material and other fragments are transformed into another reality that of the ever-enduring tradition of oil paint on canvas. |
|
“We are the picture, and the hand that paints;
The trodden pathway, and the foot that trod;
We are the humble echo of great saints” |
|
| Such fragments of text moving across Strampp’s canvases attest to the cyclic nature of this journey and are frequently derived from The Garden, by Bloomsbury Poet - Vita Sackville-West, 1946. |
|
| |
|