A Durero (To Dürer)

Paloma Navares used technology as a tool for feminist restitution. In the early 1990s, feminist art history resonated strongly in Spain. In 1991, Griselda Pollock — one of the women historians who had been fighting against the absence of women artists in art history since the 1970s — was invited by the Institute for Feminist Research at the Complutense University of Madrid. That same year, Whitney Chadwick’s Women, Art and Society was translated into Spanish, and a year later, Estrella de Diego published El andrógino sexuado (The Sexed Androgyne).
A Durero belongs to the research phase that Paloma Navares called Fragmentos del jardín de la memoria (Fragments of the Garden of Memory), in which she reproduced a series of classic iconographies of women in Western painting — in this case, Eve painted by Dürer. The black-and-white transparency copy of the naked torso becomes, in the artist’s interpretation, a body hanging from a hanger like merchandise. This ghostly form critically recontextualises this icon of representation of female seduction to reveal its condition as an object subjugated to male desire. Navares shows the mechanisms of image production with which Western culture has constructed its regime of domination over women.