PROJECT
FEATURE ARTICLE
SUZY BIRSTEIN
Ladies Not Waiting: Reimagining A Masterpiece
– ABOUT THE PROJECT
Often artists have one or two key paintings that poke them, provoke them and potentially transform the way they approach their art. In the case of artist Suzy Birstein, Diego Velazquez’s iconic Las Meninas has served as a muse and also a distinct challenge since she first saw it in Spain decades ago. Velazquez’s painting is a masterpiece of pictorial representation styled as performative trickery. But Birstein has her own sleight-of-hand skills and in her reimagined version of Velazquez’s courtly showpiece, a new cast of characters take the stage, an all female line-up, including Birstein herself at the easel. It’s as if Birstein has staged a palace coup to prove the worth of her own creative vision. A gorgeous, richly meaningful work of art.
“In reframing Las Meninas (Spanish for ‘The ladies-in-waiting’), Suzy Birstein has her own ambitions and her own star players, including placing herself at the easel, as creator and conqueror. Birstein’s Las Meninas…after Velázquez (2018) replaces the Spaniard’s motley courtly milieu with painted versions of her own mythic figurative sculptures – a carnivalesque crew of ladies definitely not waiting. “
– Barry Dumka
FEATURE ARTICLE
SUZY BIRSTEIN
Ladies Not Waiting: Reimagining A Masterpiece
Painted in 1656 and considered the pinnacle of Baroque art, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas is about status and pictorial representation and how the artist, the sly master interpreter, presents a prism of the world as he sees it. Each of the individuals featured in Velázquez’s courtly masterpiece is now iconic – the Infanta Margarita (at center in her crinoline skirt); the king’s valet Nicolasito Pertusato; and the ladies-in-waiting,, Isabel de Velasco and Maria Agustina Sarmiento de Sotomayor, seen in profile or curtseying. With the artist himself standing at the oversized easel, Velázquez’s painting is a 17th century power lineup that changed western art.
In reframing Las Meninas (Spanish for ‘The ladies-in-waiting’), Suzy Birstein has her own ambitions and her own star players, including placing herself at the easel, as creator and conqueror. Birstein’s Las Meninas…after Velázquez (2018) replaces the Spaniard’s motley courtly milieu with painted versions of her own mythic figurative sculptures – a carnivalesque crew of ladies definitely not waiting. In Birstein’s version, no one is in side profile; no one demure; all stand their ground, looking out, enigmatic but confident. And in the center, instead of a princess, Birstein places a sorceress, her own Golden Las Meninas figure, robed in glory, with a bird in her hands and a bird bath as a crown. Birstein is playing with representation and proving her charm. A female artist making her own muses the compelling stars of a masterpiece, invested with their own mythic stories.
- Barry Dumka
© Barry Dumka/BCREATIVE CONSULTING
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