[PR] Nada Serafimovski, 'Replicas' 

Walking into a room of paintings by Nada Serafimovski is reminiscent of standing in a gallery full of distorting mirrors. The images reflected back are both seductive and grotesque: over-sized portraits with unnatural proportions, disembodied faces floating in space, grinning or glaring out from beneath the surface of the image.

The artist paints onto the reverse side of sheets of glass using a mixture of pig fat and pigment. The mixture stubbornly refuses to dry, and glistens like ointment smeared over broken skin. Viewed from the front, Serafimovski’s portraits call to mind the work of Marlene Dumas. Each image is isolated and confrontational, constructed using a limited palet of flesh colours and suggestive, painterly marks describing well known faces sourced from photographs in magazines.

Viewed from the back, the paintings seem closer to the work of Frank Auerbach or Leon Kossoff. Thick layers of lard are dripped onto the surface of the glass, creating a sculptural landscape in which grooves and ridges caused by the artist’s thumb prints can still be seen.

The artist’s medium befits her subject. Each portrait depicts a celebrity who has altered their physical appearance through multiple plastic surgery. Serafimovski is the daughter of a plastic surgeon, and it is as if she has inherited her father’s craft, yet feels deeply ambivalent towards it. She does not judge her subjects, but remains fascinated by the psychological and physical worlds that they inhabit.

Her portraits question the extent to which identity can be constructed, and examine the point at which the boundaries between simulation and reality implode. They refer to a manufacturing process in which surgeon, photographer, journalist and painter conspire together to create a celebrity icon, and to a world in which our physical bodies, as well as our identities, can be maleable, plastic and constructed.

In this world of temporary identities and embodied hyper-reality, things which are real begin to deteriorate and ultimately cease to exist. The desire for beauty and preservation, and attempts to defy the onset of gravity and old age, actually hasten the eradication of that which they seek to perpetuate.

Nada Serafimovski was born in Sarajevo in 1972 and now lives and works in London.

Replicas is the inaugural show at Man&Eve and runs from 26 May – 25 June 2006. The gallery is open Friday, Saturday and Sunday 12-6pm or at other times by prior appointment.