Name Monica Majoli | ||
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Nikki darling brian kennon and monica majoli at 356 mission
Monica Majoli (born 1963) is an American artist. Her artwork examines the relationship between physicality and consciousness, expressed through the documentary sexual image. Her Rubberman series was featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and the 2006 Berlin Biennial of Contemporary Art at KW Institute of Contemporary Art. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco all include her work in their permanent collections.
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According to the Whitney Museum of American Art, Majoli's "figurative paintings from the early 1990s to the present have depicted scenes of sexual fetishism." Majoli's work Investigates "themes and rituals of identity, intimacy, and mortality" and "is both a site for catharsis and an admission of its irresolution."
Her series, "Black Mirror" (2010), includes portraits of women, "their profiles drawn in close-up in coloured pencil, forming a chiaroscuro effect on the sheets of black paper." The "polished nocturnal portraits" are made from memory, and according to Majoli, "The otherworldly half-image that is reflected by black mirror coincides with both the internal state of desire and a crisis in belief in representational painting. In these works, the surface itself holds the fetishistic power, rather than the act depicted."
Born in 1963 in Los Angeles, Majoli earned her MFA (1992) and BA (1989) from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is now a Professor of Art in Painting and Graduate Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She has also taught at UC Berkeley and the Graduate Studies program at Yale University School of Art.