Michelle Rawlings

Michelle Rawlings’ intimate painting combines visual brillance and multiplicity with reticent contemplation. The artist combines in her works different styles and manners of painting, with themes ranging from pixelated, abstract compositions and coloristically refined monochromes to the iconography of girlish Instagram shots. They are mostly created through a time-consuming, painstaking process modeled on traditional studio painting. Their intimate scale and the way their themes are chosen keeps pace with the contemporary speed of the Internet and social media. The two interpenetrate: a sense of the singularity and classic nobility of modern art and a fascination with the non-hierarchical, spontaneous and fetishistic consumption of culture peculiar to teenage girls. By stripping the former of its sublimity and imparting gravity to the latter, Rawlings seeks in her work a new, contemporary female identity: creative, subjective, intuitive, and perfectly at home in the digital world.