Charlotte Beaudry. Lady Mechanic
MACS is devoting a major retrospective to Belgian artist Charlotte Beaudry. Entitled Lady Mechanic, bringing together some forty works spanning the period from 2006 to the present. The title reflects Beaudry’s approach to painting, which she describes as being ‘like a sport’.
Self-taught, Beaudry works quickly and instinctively, completing each work in just two days. By imposing this challenge on herself with each new project, she gives her work its distinctive character: largely instinctive, stripped of artifice and calculated effect.
Charlotte Beaudry’s figurative paintings centre chiefly on everyday objects – high-heeled shoes, motorcycle helmets, house numbers, envelopes and the like –and portraits, most often of adolescent girls. Whatever catches her attention during her daily walks to the studio, her wanderings online, the books she reads, or the films, concerts and football matches she watches on television – all of it feeds into her unvarnished portrayal of reality.
There is no narrative in Charlotte Beaudry’s work. Instead, she pares each image down to its essence, confronting the viewer with its subject in a direct, head-on encounter. Removed from their original context and elevated to the status of pop icons, her motifs often seem charged with tension, as though the canvas were on the verge of exploding. She creates this effect by stripping away the superfluous and playing with scale, as in her larger-than-life rendering of a trophy, for example. The image is first printed, annotated and archived, then projected onto the canvas. The projector sometimes distorts it, helping Beaudry avoid both perfection and hyperrealism. She sketches its outlines only loosely, then departs from the source material to make room for interpretation.
Her visual repertoire draws on post-punk culture and gender studies, as well as eroticism and the poetry of the street. With irreverence and mischievous wit, she questions both the seductive power of images and the codes of femininity, at times bringing her own intimate experience into dialogue with a broader social reality.
The exhibition conveys the artist’s sensitive yet independent perspective on the world around her, imbued with the humour and lightness that characterise her work.
Lady Mechanic reveals a distinctive artistic world centred on figurative painting ‘open to multiple interpretations’. The exhibition also includes drawings, videos, performances and sculptures – forms Beaudry has explored alongside her painting throughout her career.
