Kunstverein Hamburg presents Evelyne Axell La Terre est ronde on view through June 13, 2011 .
Evelyne Axell (1935–1972), a key figure in Belgian pop art, is among the artists whose work is just emerging from the shadow cast by male pop heroes for reassessment. She experimented with various contemporary materials, combining plexiglas with enamel, with synthetic fur, foils, etc. to create substantively and visually seductive pictures. Her unusual material aesthetics combines mass-produced materials previously in advertising and industry rather than in the arts, which to some extent required considerable manual crafting. Axell used half-transparent plexiglas, painting sometimes on the front and sometimes on the reverse side in staggered compositions producing an interplay of transparent and opaque surfaces. The Kunstverein Hamburg shows a selection of later works from her very brief artistic career, which ended with her accidental death in 1972. Influenced by the 1960s and the social and political events of that period, her works penetrate taboo zones, compensating a new freedom that escapes all constraints imposed by the role of home-maker and by the stylization of woman as the object of male desire. Axell appropriates the image of the seductively denuded woman in order to incorporate it into her own desire. For her time, Axell treated materials with remarkable freedom and had addressed feminist topics even before the advent of feminism. In times when the self-image is determined externally by advertising and other medial representations, her policy of self preoccupation is of enduring relevance.
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