An artist, actor, filmmaker, farmer, teacher, and writer, Erica Rutherford’s remarkably multidisciplined career took her across several countries and continents, including Britain, the US, Spain, South Africa, and finally, Canada. While undergoing transition during the 1970s, Rutherford began experimenting with self-portraiture. Many of the works shown here are painted self-portraits, based on photographs of the artist. All feature faceless figures – flattened and deprived of any features – staged in a range of rigid poses. Bright monochromatic hues are another common feature to these works, along with bands of colours that frame the anonymous figures. Bearing an obvious affinity to Pop Art, Rutherford’s style extends the phenomenon’s critique of the mass media to a complex reflection on gender construction and agency. Writer Jay Prosser described Rutherford’s painted self-portraits as “envisioning the woman Rutherford wishes to become and are gradually transformed as she transitions into a record of that becoming . . . the painted self-portrait appears as a model for the transsexual body to follow”.
This is the first time the work of Erica Rutherford is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Marko Ilic
