Lestat 4Ever!

Description

The artworks of Sevina Tzanou (*1994), who lives and works in Bonn and Athens, are energetic and powerful pieces of paintings. Painted with gestural, scratchy brushstrokes, her mid and large-format canvases reveal scenes of nightlife, bars, strip clubs, and burlesque theatres, where glamour meets an underground kind of atmosphere. The large-scale paintings by the artist and burlesque performer depicts ecstatic bodies on the edge of abstraction that refuse to be categorised, appropriated or controlled. At a time when the right-wing around the globe is trying to gain control over reproduction, female and transgender bodies, and wants to return with all its might to biological genders and white, Christian, heteronormative roles, Tzanou unlashes a kind of identitarian Walpurgisnacht in her paintings that celebrate identity as a performative affair. Her female figures reflect the vintage looks and libertarian, feminist culture of contemporary burlesque as well as hedonism of the early 80’s.