To make the five canvases for her installation Figure who no one is... (1983-4} Avis Newman worked from life drawings of female nudes, which she drew and re-drew until she was left with a flurry of marks, scribbles, stains, lines and blotches. During the process both the identity of the figure, and Newman's identity as an artist able to create a coherent vision in her art, dissolved.
Newman's deliberate ambiguity allies her with some feminist work on the politics of representation. In the catalogue for a 1994-5 exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery (where Newman's work was seen alongside that of Paula Rego and John Murphy), critic Sarah Kent quoted Newman saying:' I'm using the body as a vehicle for discussing boundaries', and that her concern was with 'the body of art, of identification and of knowledge, rather than the physical body'. As Kent points out, Newman's art is in sympathy with Roland Barthes's analysis of images as texts (see his Image-Music-Text, London 1977), spaces in which a variety of signs and symbols merge and clash. Psychoanalytic theory also illuminates Newman's work, and Freud's account of subjectivity as fluid and unstable. The artist referred to Freud in the title of a group of drawings of 1981-2, The Day's Residues, in which readable signs half emerge from darkness, echoing Freud's accounts of unconscious desires and fears brought to the surface by psychoanalysis.
Newman's more recent installations have included Vicious Circle (1993), representing an emotional loop of hope, desire and despair. Near-black and near-white canvases absorbed or reflected the light, repulsing the viewer's attempts to relate to them. Books and portfolios on stands seemed to offer an explanation, but their blank pages made reading impossible. In 1995, at an exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and Camden Arts Centre, London, Newman exhibited a series of paintings, Webs, and a group of Boxes. In the paintings, broken lines floated in free-fall around a void. The gilt and gesso frames of the boxes suggested that their contents were precious, but inside were feathers, pigment, graphite and pebbles. The installation was a melancholic meditation on the refusal of indifferent media and matter to hold or express meaning for us. |
