The work of Charlotte Beaudry primarily questions relations between femininity and its representation, as she confronts her intimate experience with a wider social reality. Following a long pictorial period devoted to the development of an adolescent girl, there comes, today, an iconography extended to feminine objects or attributes (necklaces, ornaments, accessories) of which the artist senses the formal, metaphorical and symbolic potential.
Imbued with a raw energy tinged with impertinence or mischievousness, Charlotte Beaudry explores a visual and sensitive repertoire originating from, among others, post- punk cultures, gender studies or eroticism. Between small formats – suited to the fineness of the details – and more monumental canvases characterized by surprising changes in scale, Charlotte Beaudry renews the possibilities of figurative painting, to which she brings formal invention and conceptual engagement. At once invested in the materiality of painting and attentive to the ambiguities of the image’s seductions, Beaudry pursues a coherent and fiercely independent oeuvre which draws the subtle and raw portrait of contemporary femininity.
Although she is known for often very large works, she shows the same mastery in smaller paintings. These include some works from the series A rose, is a rose, is a rose, where only the stem with the thorns is visible and also from Skirts, magnified details of a skirt. Also, some individual works in which she creates an intriguing image with a few summary features. Charlotte Beaudry’s work is present in several public and private collections at home and abroad. Anyone driving into or out of Brussels via the Annie-Cordy tunnel cannot look past her intervention – some 30 portraits of young women.
A self-taught artist, Charlotte Beaudry is above all a painter, a practice which she enhances with drawings, videos, performances and sculptures. Her work primarily questions relations between femininity and its representation, as she confronts her intimate experience with a wider social reality. Following a long pictorial period devoted to the development of an adolescent girl, there comes, today, an iconography extended to feminine objects or attributes (necklaces, ornaments, accessories) of which the artist senses the formal, metaphorical and symbolic potential.
Imbued with a raw energy tinged with impertinence or mischievousness, Charlotte Beaudry explores a visual and sensitive repertoire originating from, among others, post- punk cultures, gender studies or eroticism. Between small formats – suited to the fineness of the details – and more monumental canvases characterised by surprising changes in scale, Charlotte Beaudry renews the possibilities of figurative painting, to which she brings formal invention and conceptual engagement.
At once invested in the materiality of painting and attentive to the ambiguities of the image’s seductions, Beaudry pursues a coherent and fiercely independent oeuvre which draws the subtle and raw portrait of contemporary femininity.
