Artprize Perfect

Artprize Perfect is a small-scale painting based on a Mapplethorpe image. It is comprised of evident and personal mark-making that can only be appreciated from up close, thereby encouraging an intimacy and participation that is part of a different viewing relationship than is offered by a large-scale piece. Through the art historical precedent it references, this piece reflects the layered nature of art-experience based on education and awareness of precedents, and quietly offers a discussion on the function of art and the relationship of art objects to their viewers. What is the responsibility that viewers might bear towards works of art? And yet this work must be somewhat ironic. For it remains a painting of a flower – a work whose conceptual dynamics might easily be lost to the passive and uninformed viewer, who would then appreciate it based on its craft and personal aesthetic appeal. This (unfinished) piece singly embodies the tension between “conceptual” and “aesthetic” art.

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