This is the Altarpiece triptych from the Tullman Collection mentioned in the post.
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SARAH BEREZA: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY TRENT MORSE
'Pastoral Scene with Chickens', 2007
'Adam and Eve After the Expulsion', 2006
Painter Sarah Bereza's "great subject" for the past few years has been the sorority girl. These "Feisty Foxy Vixens," as she calls her sorority sisters in one painting, show up in distorted portraiture and in male-fantasy scenarios of college co-eds (her pink painting of a vicious, yet erotic, pillow fight comes to mind). Though the artist's approach remains decidedly ambiguous, the girls appear as plucky predators or ridiculed victims, or, most often, as both of these archetypes at once.
Such ambiguity comes from the artist's interest in psychological dualities and from her closeness to her subjects. While studying painting at the University of Michigan, Bereza herself was a member of the conservative Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. The house followed strict codes of conduct. "Men were not allowed in," she told me, "except sometimes for dinner, and the girls would sing and cheer." This closed atmosphere also led to indiscretions among the sisters. "There were a handful of lesbians who weren't out of the closet. We were on lesbian patrol," she joked.
In Bereza's series of oval portraits called 'The Conquests,' her female sitters lack the toothy smiles or stern faces one expects to find in formal portraiture. Instead, they seem to have lost all control of their facial muscles, which contort in miens of ecstatic agony. To achieve this jarring effect, Bereza scoured Internet porn sites for images of women mid-orgasm and, as she put it, "amalgamated the sorority girl's face with the porn star's face."
Each portrait resides in a gaudy, hand-carved frame and is capped by a set of antlers or horns like a mounted hunting trophy. Bereza calls 'The Conquests' a "list of girls who were lured." But the effect harbors allusions beyond just innocent prey - their wild facial expressions combined with the horns make the girls appear to be untamed, nearly demonic, beasts who were on the prowl themselves. They just got captured before they could nab their own trophies.
Bereza's work continues along the vein of John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, who reinvigorated figurative painting in the 1990s. Like these artists, she plays on art-historical styles and motifs while retaining of-the-moment hair and clothing fashions.
In the Gothic-framed triptych 'Altarpiece,' Bereza replaces the typical Christian allegory one would find in a church-commissioned work by, say, Fra Angelico with an everyday scene of three girls ritualistically primping themselves in front of a bathroom mirror: one adjusts her breasts, another curls her eyelashes, while a third puts on lipstick. These self-absorbed busybodies are completely oblivious of our prying eyes, as though we are spying through a two-way mirror.
A more unusual narrative arises from 'Pastoral Scene with Chickens.' A Rubenesque blond relaxes amid a flock of chickens in a bucolic Dutch landscape; crushed eggs trickle down her dimpled back and butt cheeks. The woman glances over her shoulder with a mischievous smirk. Like many of Bereza's subjects, she is brash and crass, yet sweetly innocent. "I try for an equal balance of formality with an element of salacious behavior," Bereza said of her work. Salacious indeed.
As for how the Kappa Kappa Gamma girls feel about her portrayals, some of them enjoy the painterly attentions of their artistic sister, and "some of them stopped talking to me," she said.
Trent Morse
To see more of Sarah Bereza's work registered on Saatchi Online click here.
Trent Morse is an arts journalist and a medical writer based in New York. He has an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where he produced a collection of stories about artists who use celebrity subject matter in their work.