Flora

Madahar, Neeta

Code: 3088

ISBN: 9781590052501

Publisher: Nazraeli Press

New Hardcover First Edition

Price: £40

In stock, ready to ship

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, personification is the representation 'of a thing or abstraction as a person.? In Neeta Madahar's new series of allegorical portraits 'Flora,' the traditional procedure of personification is reversed: here, actual women appropriate imagery stretching back to antiquity to fashion an empowering public persona. A favorite subject of Renaissance and Baroque painters, Flora was traditionally depicted as a young woman surrounded by reveling devotees bearing floral tributes. Madahar, however, presents us with a different Flora. Her immediate inspiration was not Botticelli but the stylized portrait photography of the 1930-50s including that of Cecil Beaton, Angus McBean and Madame Yevonde. These are images of real women whose bodies and comportment exemplify a willful sense of self-possession won through lived experience. Printed in process color on matt art paper, and opening with an insightful essay by Allan Doyle. This beautifully-produced artist?s book is bound in French suede covers in a first edition of 1,000 copies. ISBN. 978-1-59005-250-1 Hardcover, 11 x 14, 48 pages, 17 four-color plates.