Huguette Caland

Huguette Caland began her career in the early 1960s with erotic abstract paintings and body landscapes and continued to explore the body in a free-spirited way throughout the seventies when she had relocated to Paris. There she collaborated with renowned poets and artists such as Adonis, Georges Apostu and Pierre Cardin. Caland eventually moved to Venice, California in 1987, where her work progressed across a wide range of medium, with her most recent canvases reflecting distorted distance and layered memory, with a playful modernist abstraction. Her work is included in private and public collections across the Middle East, Europe and the US.

I’m choosing her piece “Self-Portrait”, 1971, which is a piece from a series of drawings I saw in the Venice Biennale, which were extraordinarily delicate, intimate ink drawings of female genitalia, for my subject image;

This will influence my studio practice by looking into a different feminist idea, which is also fed from Cath’s constellation group ‘Goddesses and Monsters’, where we speak about how shocking a woman’s vagina is, along with theories by Freud about Castration Fear, Phallic women, etc. I’m looking forward to incorporating ideas from many different areas in order to develop this particular drawing.