Portfolio > Witch's Brew

Self Portrait as Bouguereau’s The Assault
Oil on linen
61 ¼ x 42 ½ inches
2012
Basquiat as Velazquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja
Oil on linen
32 ¼ x 28 ¾ inches
2011
The Biker after Matthias Grünewald’s Head of a Shouting Man
Pencil on paper
Approximately 16 x 21 inches
2014
The Biker after Peter Paul Rubens’s Head of a Satyr
Gouache and pastel on paper
Approximately 12 ½ x 16 ½ inches
2013
The Biker after Van Dyck’s Old Bearded Man Carrying a Bundle
Pastel on paper
Approximately 15 ½ x 16 inches
2013
The Biker after Andrea Mantegna’s Allegory of Vice and Virtue
Gouache and colored pencil on paper
Approximately 13 ¾ x 14 ½ inches
2013

Kathleen Gilje: Witch’s Brew

Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, LLC
24 West 57th Street, Suite 305
New York, NY 10019

January 31- March 14, 2014

A veteran painting restorer, Kathleen Gilje is renowned for her intricate recreations of artworks revised to provide shrewd, often humorous social commentary, while, at the same time, providing deeper insight into the historical context of the artwork being referenced. In this show, Gilje invites us all to stir the pot of time between the Old Masters and the newest inventions of the modern technological age—from a motorcycle to an iPhone—thereby allowing us as viewers to participate in her “witch’s brew.”

Witch’s Brew will feature new works in which Gilje includes herself in various guises enacting scenes from Renaissance and Baroque paintings—some based on those she conserved over the course of her former career as a restorer. Gilje guides the viewer to identify with her role as artist and living agent in the artwork to recontextualize the figures they contain as beings complete with desires and neuroses, rather than as mere allegorical symbols or vessels of painterly prowess as they are often interpreted by modern viewers. In Self Portrait Slaying a Rooster after Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, 2012, Gilje appears as the agent of violence, Judith slicing off the head of a dragon size rooster, and in Self Portrait as Bouguereau’s The Assault, 2012, as the cherubic object of love, the target of paint brushes rather than arrows.

The centerpiece of the exhibition, The Birth of Tragedy after Giuseppe de Ribera’s Drunken Silenus, revises a work that Gilje restored at age twenty-four, one she grew to know intimately over many months of apprenticeship at the Museum of Capodimonte in Naples, Italy—a pivotal moment in her artistic development. In the original, an obese Silenus is fed wine by two satyrs, attended by an elf-like figure and a donkey; Gilje presents herself as a pointy-eared impish figure while the donkey rides into the scene on a motorcycle, and a tattooed Silenus’s chest reads “The Birth of Tragedy.” The painting is joined by a series of new works that provide cheeky commentary on social networking, a reprise of her signature series in which contemporary pop cultural and artistic figures are inserted into renaissance-era portraiture. The resulting works offer a more complete understanding of the original subjects as well as Gilje’s ingenious adaptations of them.