Slaying is Anna Ostoya's third exhibition at the Bortolami Gallery in New York. In her latest paintings and photomontages, the artist presents refigurations of the iconic painting Judith Slaying Holofernes, exploring the theme of violence in art and everyday life.
The 17th-century original by Artemisia Gentileschi depicts the story of Judith, a Jewish widow who saves her besieged people from Assyrians. Intoxicating the Assyrian army general Holofernes with her charm and alcohol, Judith cuts his head off, thus saving Israel.
In Slaying, Ostoya painstakingly analyses the original painting by reworking it through a series of geometrical abstractions. The artist substitutes Judith for Holofernes and Holofernes for Judith, making each figure attack itself. Slain Traces, another project by Ostoya, features a series of black and white photomontages in which the artist investigates the topic of violence in art. Gentileschi's canvas is juxtaposed here with works by Georgia O'Keefe and Pablo Picasso as well as everyday items.
Besides classical feminist interpretations of the figure of Judith, Ostoya invokes here other dimensions of violence: ‘visceral striving to define self-identity and integrity against the world with its taboos and its wars,’ omnipresent in the contemporary world.
Anna Ostoya, born in 1978 in Kraków is a New York-based artist known to employ multiple media in her work: paintings, objects, sculptures, texts and sounds which make up topical series of work. She has exhibited her work at 2015 Lyon Biennial, Power Plant Toronto and the Museum of Modern Art among others. Her paintings will be featured in the upcoming Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting, published by Phaidon Press.