Beauty Is The Hardest Drug
Katharina Arndt and Rebecca Weber at Two Window Project
Marking the start of Berlin’s fall 2011 art season Two Window Project presents new works by Katharina Arndt of Germany and Rebecca Weber of the USA in their dual solo exhibition Beauty Is The Hardest Drug. Through their new works, these two artists explore today’s perception of beauty, celebrity and a host of the accoutrements of its darker side that have been associated with this phenomenon.
The title of the exhibition, Beauty Is The Hardest Drug, is attributed to Andy Warhol in particular and borrowed from an article in Interview Magazine from the 1970’s written by Bob Colacello. It was during this time that New York was at the dawn of it’s ‘Pop Revolution’ and a whole new generation was being fueled by Warhol’s probably more famous quote “In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes”, actors, artists, designers and models alike were all grasping for their quarter hour in the spotlight. Since then a variety of medicinal practices and potions that have been developed to cultivate a more enhanced or higher level of performance in this world of beauty helping to catapult some contenders to the front of the cue.
Katharina Arndt’s super-realistic portraits, meticulously rendered in color pencil depict easily recognizable personas from the current medias of television, movies and sports. Her drawings of these 21st century icons display an ironic twist, as the color palettes for each are strangely beautiful, far from natural and purposefully arbitrary in their composition. As seen in her Scarlett series, the subject’s hair in a pink tint and skin of darkened greens shades, suggesting an extraordinary, unearthly or possibly a manufactured beauty. Her drawings of these famous and familiar people that are loosely based on the images being flashed in the tabloids or on the screen help us to explore, from a totally new perspective, their perceived degree of beauty and celebrity.
Rebecca Weber’s paintings in oil on wood panel in a plein air style are completely juxtaposed by their subject matter. In these smaller scale paintings, contemporary imagery such as a bottle of Botox with a syringe or various prescription and recreational drugs are depicted. The underlying harshness connected with these various pharmaceuticals has been delicately softened by the artist’s brush strokes. In this series Rebecca dares to illustrate the many tabooed indulgences that have assisted many along their path to a higher state and may have also derailed some who might have abused them.
Read the introduction to Beauty Is The Hardest Drug by Serena Yang (Los Angeles based Journalist, Director, Documentary Filmmaker):
To ask what is beauty today is to come face to face with the changing definition of beauty. Perhaps more than any other time in history, we are preoccupied with, even confused by beauty; it’s power, it’s pleasures, it’s style, and it’s substance. Beauty may not be the most important of our values, but it affects us all; today more than ever because we live in a Media Age where our visual landscape changes in seconds, and our first reaction to people is sometimes our last. Given this reality, the so-called ‘triviality’ of beauty suddenly seems not so trivial after all.
The beauty we see today is different, more complex. It is elusive, doctored and controversial. No longer is beauty limited to a pretty face or a pretty picture: beauty has come to personify and reflect the social and cultural issues of our day.
As we move through our relentless digital landscape, we must ask ourselves: when will beauty no longer be defined by commodified images – flawless features, without regard to what is underneath the surface? How are our judgements shaped by the images we see?
However we try to define beauty for ourselves, we are bombarded by idealistic images vying for our attention. The best of these images speak not to just our wallets but to our minds. They demand that we question society’s notions about appearance, and re-examine our own attitudes and ideas about beauty.
