Canadian artist Sara Cwynar’s 72 Pictures of Modern Painting is a wallpaper piece she has made by collating 72 modern artworks from the 1900s. These are pieces like Lichtenstein, Picasso, Pollock and many more that have been deliberately chosen and then mashed together to show how women of the time were depicted.
In doing so, Cwynar has created a commentary on how modern art, mostly of European origins that were made over a hundred years ago, have come to shape our ideas of what ideal beauty is to this very day.
The final piece was deliberately made a wallpaper, a piece of interior decor that is considered background to a room, something that people can build up on instead of a final whole. In fact, whenever Cwynar displays the piece, she puts her other pieces on top of it. These are pieces that speak instead of women empowerment and intersectional feminism. By doing so, Cwynar states that today people have the option to think of the European beauty standards as background information, a part of history that society can move on from.
With the piece Cwynar affirms that people now have the ability to cherish new representations of all sorts of women’s bodies that have been shunned for so long. All in order to create a more equal world, one where European body standards are no longer the norm. Hence, Cwynar has created a space to reflect on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Gender Equality.
To create the wallpaper, Cwynar began by first collecting the images she would like to collate from encyclopedias. These are some of the world’s most renowned modern paintings by Picasso, Francis Bacon, Matisse, Seurat, Malevich and many, all of whom are European men.
Cwynar then created reproductions of the painting by scanning them from the encyclopedias, including the stains and printing errors that could be visibly seen.
By preserving these marks from the encyclopedia, Cwynar has added another layer of symbolism. She demonstrates how antiquated these beauty standards are, as they have been pulled from the pages of an encyclopedia, the byproduct of an information age that did not have the luxury of having access to the internet.
Through 72 Pictures of Modern Paintings, Cwynar deconstructs the idealized representations of women perpetuated by modern art. She challenges her viewers to interrogate the historical roots of beauty and consider more realistic alternatives, options that instead are intersectional and empowering.
Find out more about 72 Pictures of Modern Paintings and Sara Cwynar’s other pieces by checking her Instagram on @cwynars.