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reviews sTElla vinE
stella vine:
Paintings
ModErn arT oxford
17 July - 23 sEpTEM bEr
It’s fitting that the introductory essay accompanying
Stella Vine’s largest-ever solo show is by Germaine
Greer, a figure as tenuously related to serious
art criticism as her subject, Vine, is to serious art
practice. Not that we should reproach Vine for a lack
of seriousness, when both she and her defenders
are in truth hopelessly mired in their own (candy-
coloured) miasma of earnest pontificating and misdirected faux-egalitarianism. Much more respectable to
Diana Picnic, 2007, acrylic on canvas,
213 x 244 cm. © the artist
laud the efforts of a (faux?) naïf who paints celebrities than to just go out and buy a copy of Heat magazine and
get on with dredging it of every enjoyable ounce of pathos and absurdity yourself. Right?
The vast majority of the works shown here are – to turn a phrase of Greer’s – no less a ‘pernicious
illusion’ which ‘annihilates the women who occasioned them’ than those produced by today’s culture of low-
rent celebrity. Worse, while one might regard Vine’s own conviction that her work represents something more
than simply the intellectually pallid, aesthetically unconvincing and ultimately really quite boring effluvia of that
culture as obviously self-serving, to conspire in feeding her – and a good many others’ – delusion is no less
craven. The hundred-plus paintings on show in Oxford, most dating from 2003 to the present, run the gamut
from those which first floated Charles Saatchi’s boat to those which have become mainstays in the pantheon
of curatorial dunderheadedness. Lily Cole (2005), Kate Moss (2005), Pete Doherty (2005), Courtney Love
(2004) and Princess Diana (2003–7) – enough queens-in-waiting to make even the most vehement royalist
reconsider – clamber over and between the likes of Katie Price, aka Jordan (2004), Abi Titmuss (2005) and
heroin-casualty Rachel Whitear (2004). It’s not even very funny.
Vine has always painted scenes from her own life, and these are here, too, though (and without dwelling
on the same biography which her detractors have repeatedly used as a stick to beat her with), it’s hard to see
what we might get out of them. Only a Greer could look at Vine’s portraits of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2005),
the Bronte sisters (2005) and Sylvia Plath (2005) and think they have much to do with anything except via the
most cloying form of knee-jerk identification. One work, Goltzschtalbrucke part 2 (2003), has been turned into
a print. Available to buy in the gallery shop, the text reads: ‘we are unhappy with this life and seek another one’.
Oxford, always a little wet, but partly under floodwaters at the time of writing, will no doubt have identified with
such a sentiment. Unfortunately this show is unlikely to offer anything less lachrymose. Rather, as fans of Vine
are all too keen to remind us, it, like her work, merely wells and dribbles. Luke Heighton
artreview 156
NEW_October_REVIEWS.indd 10 4/9/07 12:33:25
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