MIA FUNK
PRESS RELEASE
Mia Funk
Inside the Artist’s Studio
THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
March 5 to March 29, 2013 / Opening Tuesday, March 5th, 18.00-20.30
To coincide with the 20th anniversary of Francis Bacon’s death, and the two years since Lucian Freud’s demise, a number of museums have mounted exhibitions looking back on both artists’ lives and works. The American University of Paris is therefore delighted to exhibit the works of American-born artist Mia Funk and her paintings examining these artists and their creative process.
With her award-winning series ‘Inside the Artist’s Studio’, Mia Funk has devoted a large portion of her career to painting intimate, honest and, at times, critical portraits, of Bacon and Freud among others. Now her large scale works which caused a great stir when they were first shown in Dublin, Bacon’s birthplace, are being shown for the first time in Paris. The paintings cast a cold eye on these two giants, depicting them in dramatic and sometimes violent or shocking arrangements.
In the delightfully iconoclastic An Audience with the Queen (for which Funk won a Thames & Hudson Prize) Freud is seated naked on a sofa, watching TV beside his one-time model, Queen Elizabeth II, who with nothing more than a strategically place cup of tea, seems to be exchanging a naughty glance with the artist. Two years ago the same painting was briefly exhibited in Dublin during the Queen’s first state visit, but had to be taken down following some controversy. Funk says that the painting was a reaction to Freud’s own uncharacteristically restrained portrait of the Queen. ‘I said to myself, what if he were allowed to paint her like one of his usual fleshy nudes’. She says that the celebrated portraitist was himself a fascinating figure to paint and she is delighted that her ‘what if’ paintings are being received in Paris in the light hearted manner in which they were painted.
The Price of Art is Murder, oil on canvas 109 x 155 cm
From the satirical Funk moves on to the darkly disturbing The Price of Art is Murder shows Freud standing framed in a doorway holding a butchers knife in one hand and paint brushes in another, while his model lies like meat on what looks like a butcher’s block as thought about to make the ultimate sacrifice. This is indeed, as Professor Patrick E. Healy put it– “art as a scene of a crime where Funk literally creates a scene of pandemonium...the exploded shell behind the fourth wall of a stage on which the fantasies and life of the artist have been projected.” We can concur with his 2009 essay on Funk in which he wrote “Her images will not serve for distraction. They need attention and thought. They are there to confront and be confronted.”
Those wondering how Freud felt to see himself so depicted, might be surprised to learn he was relaxed when he was informed of Funk’s portrait. But given his lothario reputation, not to mention his penchant for painting explicitly-splayed nudes (the octogenarian could be seen as recently as last year in Vanity Fair photographed shirtless and standing above one of his nude female models) it’s less surprising.
Her portraits of Francis Bacon, however are all fully clothed and bear a resemblance which, according to his good friend Bruno Sabatier, author of the book Francis Bacon. Œuvre graphique, catalogue raisonné, is uncanny “what can I say, it doesn't just look like Bacon. It is Bacon!” Coming from the first gallerist to show Bacon’s work in France, a former Art publisher and now owner of a gallery focusing almost exclusively on the work of Francis Bacon, she could not be paid a higher compliment.
For those who may have seen previous exhibitions on Bacon and Freud, Inside the Artist’s Studio truly reveals a different side of these two artists, who exemplify more than most artists of the last half of the 20th century, our contemporary obsession with art as autobiography.
The show is divided into two themes, in the second Funk shows herself to be more than just a talented portraitist skilled in the depiction of genre scenes (for which won a Prix de Peinture at the Salon d’Automne de Paris 2009). She is also, and these days primarily, a painter of solitary almost translucent figures standing before the sea or lost in the desert. Haunting, metaphysical works that, in the words of Healy, “become like the mood of a person she has known very closely” full of “strong emotional and spiritual isolation...which becomes in her work an emblem of the lonely search of the artist.”
The only drawback in this otherwise impeccable exhibition is that there was not room for more of these, only ten studies, the larger versions of which will be shown in Cannes and Brussels later in the year.
An Audience with the Queen, oil on canvas 110 x 143.2 cm
Beneath the Ice (study)
mixed technique on watercolour paper
41 x 50 cm
The Island (study)
mixed technique on watercolour paper
42 x 59cm
Amidst all the trends in contemporary art, it is refreshing to see a show which is all about beauty – whether it is the subtle beauty of the evocative paintings she calls La Mer, or the terrible beauty of a great work art whose very creation feeds on destruction, long hours of isolation and sacrifice.
> Vernissage: Tuesday, March 5th, 18.00-20.30
> Conference by Professor Patrick Healy March 5th, 19.00 in Gallery
Professor at TU Delft lecturing in aesthetics and contemporary art, author of Beauty and the Sublime and The Model and its Architecture. www.patrick-healy.com
THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
6, rue du Colonel Combes
75007 Paris
AUP Tel: (33/1) 40.62.07.20
Contacts Presse :
(English/French): Michael Bouhanna
(Chinese): Li Silei
ART OPENING at AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
CONFERENCE BY PATRICK HEALY
(Associate Professor, TU DELFT)