Bay is delighted to be exhibiting in this summer’s collective show ‘Dirty Pink’ in Sporting Club Russafa, Valencia. The exhibition, curated by Tina McCallan is an exhibition of thirteen international women artists responding to the controversial colour pink. 

The exhibition opens on Friday 2^nd July at 18.00 until 22.00 and will run until 31^st July.

Themes of the Russafa art exhibition

Tina intends to pose important questions through the exhibition, including whether gender is a performance and the reality of a “feminine or feminist aesthetic”. As she explains,

“Over the centuries, society’s perception of the colour has changed, at times being considered feminine, erotic, kitsch, sophisticated or transgressive. 

According to Valerie Steele the author of Pink: the history of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Colour, The 150-year-old notion of pink as synonymous with fragile femininity is being challenged. We’ve seen the rise of millennial pink as an ‘It’ hue, but also its appropriation by feminists around the world as a powerful, socio-political mark.”

Participating Valencia and International Artists

The participating artists will address this ambiguity alongside their own individual styles and concerns:

•  Perfection and imperfection, be it the mathematical perfection in the abstract works of Katrina Blannin who in, “Maximillian # 101 and 102”, bases her abstract works on the mathematical formulas of the Old Masters or the colour perfection of Caroline List, for example in, “Chromascape Scarlet Green” uses complimentary colour gradients to refer to Modernist abstraction and representational languages. Illusory perfection can be seen in the iridescent skin of “Raimunda IV” by Josie McCoy whose uncannily realistic portraits of female celebrities give the viewer a sense of the “unheimlich”

• The surface perfection of the blank canvas is physically attacked in the works by Marie Julou with glitter-sprinkled, scratched and pencil doodled oil paint. In “Glitter Circle” and “Sgraffiti Doodle 1” she mixes both “low” and “high” art materials on amateur canvases and, with tongue firmly in cheek, she seeks to challenge the modernist patriarchal hegemony while in Sandi Goodwin’s “Splash of Pink”, the energetic gestural strokes of colour almost burst out of the frame.

• In Celia Kettle’s “Shot through the Heart” the circle operates as a metaphor for the individual with watery spheres breaking out of their boundaries and spilling out onto the white canvas like blood stains.

•  Partly inspired by Magritte’s “The Lovers” as well as the judgement around women breastfeeding in public, Motherhood is tackled in Alex Baker’s graphically beautiful photos entitled, “This is Motherhood” of women breast feeding while Francesca Ricci’s subtly layered paintings entitled “In Utero” are dotted with esoteric signs and symbols referring to the experience of maternity as an almost alchemical process.

• Beauty, self-image, and identity are tackled in the work of Bay Backner with alien-like flesh-coloured floral forms in “Allegory”, threatening to obliterate the figure. Painted “Alla prima”, (wet into wet) these portraits are based on photos of the artist, the surfaces of which are then decorated with embroidered patterns.

•  The fragmented and politicised female body is dealt with in Emma Shapiro’s “”Cuerpas”, video series.  Using old life modelling photos of herself, she cuts them up and reassembles them mixing heads, torsos, and legs then films them in an animated dance which resembles scientific flicker tests. In her “Nipple Wall”, visitors will be able to take a selfie in front of wallpaper printed with the nipples of hundreds of women, challenging the censorship around this part of the body.

•  In Lauren Moffatt’s film loop entitled “Rose, coloured” in a futile attempt at control, the artist has painted in oil directly onto her image on the frames of a super 8 film with the effect that the acid in the paint dissolves and ultimately destroys the film.   K.L. Brown shows us, in “Sophie’s choice”, a photographic work of a discarded dolls house which aims to question the social structures around us and their effect on our psychological state while Ashley Davies’s painting hovers between abstraction and figuration in a liminal space influenced by her visual impairment questioning the certainty of perception.

Exhibition Times and Dates

Dirty Pink will inaugurate on Friday 2^nd July at 18.00 until 22.00, and then be open to visitors on the dates below:

Saturday 3^rd /10^th/17^th/24^th/ July 11am -2pm