“Evelyne Axell : From Studies to Paintings” in the Chapel of St. Agnes Church.
Evelyne Axell : From Studies to Paintings
March 25 – April 24, 2022
Despite her short career as a painter, Axell experimented with many techniques and used a range of very different materials to express herself. This exhibition presents exclusive works, sometime never shown before, directly related to her working process or variants of well-known paintings. Most of the works are on paper, cardboard or even tracing paper.
Axell basically used existing documents to create. It started with typical Pop Art reference material such as magazines or advertising. But soon she decided to use her own representation as a female body, asking her husband or friends to take pictures of her naked. She even referred to some shots taken during her holidays, like in Istanbul. Later she directly referred to her own acts photographed by others, the main one being the “happening” she organised during the opening of her exhibition at the Foncke Gallery in Ghent in 1969.
Her working technique was quite ingenious. Using a print of the photograph or a magazine page she copied the image in pencil onto a tracing paper, accentuating the shadows and drawing their outline. She then determined the outer lines of the composition. She used felt tip pen or gouache to colour the image but sometimes simply numbered areas to indicate the colour to be used. At a later stage using a pantograph, she enlarged her drawing with the shadows on a larger paper that would be used to make the final drawing on Plexiglas.
In 1971 – 1972 she also occasionally came back to the technique of collage but, this time, cutting out her own drawings and gluing them on a silver cardboard background quite similar to those used for her Plexiglas paintings. These works are usually totally original variants of larger Plexiglas paintings.
Some works in the exhibition.
Black is beautiful.
In 1970 Axell campaigned against the imprisonment of U.S. Marxist feminist Angela Davis as part of the “Belgian Free Angela Davis Committee”. Her name is listed on the Committee’s annexed “Manifeste signé exclusivement par des femmes” (Manifesto signed exclusively by women). Around the same time Axell made a preparatory drawing on tracing paper, a portrait of a black woman wearing the Afro hairstyle which was also fashioned by Angela Davis as a political statement of ‘black pride’. Axell took the portrait from the page of a French magazine (presumably Paris Match) that read “Black is Beautiful. Aujourd’hui les Noirs sont fiers d’être noirs” (‘Today black people are proud to be black’). This very precise preparatory drawing was never realized as a painting and remains the only trace of this project.
Campus 1.
In the same year of her engagement for the case of Angela Davis, Axell created another highly political painting, “Campus”, commemorating the events of the Kent State University Shooting. National Guardsmen had fired into a crowd of students demonstrating against the Vietnam War at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970. They left four students dead, one permanently paralysed and another eight wounded. Inspired by the cover of Time Magazine of May 18, 1970 this collage on paper is a later variant of the painting representing Mary Ann Vecchio, a friend of the shot students, captured kneeling over one of their corpses in shock and bereavement.
Trois études pour “L’assemblée libre” – Vernissage 2.
In 1969 Axell organized a Happening at Foncke Gallery in Ghent, Belgium, bringing into the crowd a young woman wearing nothing but an astronaut helmet, which disguised her identity (being the wife of a well-known collector who had mingled before with the audience). Against the background of a languorous music Axell then dressed her model starting with her stockings, panties, and bra, with a ‘sensuality that sent the audience into ecstasy’, seductive like a reversed striptease. The evening ended with a stormy debate led by the French leading critic Pierre Restany and the Belgian critics Jean Dypréau and Karel Geirlandt on “Sexual Revolution in Art”.
The “Happening” was documented in photographs and Axell used some of the motifs as signature iconography in later paintings such as “L’assemblée libre” and “Vernissage” representing this “reversed striptease” watched by Belgian critic Jean Dypréau.
Etude pour L’esprit critique”.
This study that led to a major painting now in the collection of Ghent Museum of Modern Art (SMAK) is also inspired from two photographs taken during the “Happening”.
The background represents the Belgian writer and art critic Karel Geirlandt, who later became the founder Ghent Museum of Modern Art, interestingly watching the audience.
In the foreground two women are discussing.
The one on the left is Evelyne Axell and the one on the right is Denise, the woman who appeared naked with an astronaut helmet a few moments before.
Souvenir d’un voyage à Istanbul.
In July 1969 Eveline Axell went to Turkey for holidays and her husband, Jean Antoine, took a photograph of her in a Muslim cemetery with very “phallic” tombstones. At the background, the now mosque Hagía Sophía appears, a symbol of Istanbul. This photograph inspired this project and led to a work now on show at Le Delta in Namur, Belgium.
Photo credits: Roman Maerz, Raymond Ceuppens, Paul Louis.
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