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拍品专文
Internationally exhibited in eminent cultural institutions such as Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the MoMA in New York, Indian born and London trained Saudi-Kuwaiti artist Munira Al-Kazi seldom comes up at auction and the present Abstract Expressionist and Realist reclining nude is a rare example of her oeuvre. Here, the artist included geometric style and figuration to compose her painting and successfully transposed the light on the feminine figure by contrasting a curving bright colour line - on the right part of the body - and thick warm colours. This line clearly reveals the right bosom of the nude, giving sensuality and eroticism to the painting. Therefore, Munira Al-Kazi, a female artist, unconventionally allows the viewer to enter an intimate space in which the naked woman appears to be confident, despite her featureless and therefore expressionless face.
She is unidentifiable, as if the painter allows her only to exist by her graceful shapes to glorify her femininity, despite her curled up position. Placed next to her feet, is a painting within a painting- a still life of a potted plant and some fruit. The fruit accentuate the theatricality of the unknown setting and could quite plausibly represent fertility. The potted plant could refer to vice and virtue - according to Western art - or simply to normal vegetal patterns as seen in Islamic art and calligraphy. Besides this, the colours used to adorn the body, mostly earth tones with light fragments of blue, create an imaginary atmosphere. Finally, the silhouette is almost erased as it merges with the background denouncing how women are seen as decorative objects in a household, and as ‘props’ for fruitfulness given the allusions to fertility in this work.
She is unidentifiable, as if the painter allows her only to exist by her graceful shapes to glorify her femininity, despite her curled up position. Placed next to her feet, is a painting within a painting- a still life of a potted plant and some fruit. The fruit accentuate the theatricality of the unknown setting and could quite plausibly represent fertility. The potted plant could refer to vice and virtue - according to Western art - or simply to normal vegetal patterns as seen in Islamic art and calligraphy. Besides this, the colours used to adorn the body, mostly earth tones with light fragments of blue, create an imaginary atmosphere. Finally, the silhouette is almost erased as it merges with the background denouncing how women are seen as decorative objects in a household, and as ‘props’ for fruitfulness given the allusions to fertility in this work.