Tania Antoshina

Another print from this edition exhibited:
Moscow, Guelman Gallery, Museum of a Woman, 1997
New York, Florence Lynch Gallery, Museum of a Woman, 2001
Rosenheim, Germany, Iskusstwo 2000, 2001
Moscow, Tretyakov Gallery, Femme Art, 2002
Washington DC, Georgetown Univeristy Art Galleries, New Identities New Forms, 2002
Paramus, New Jersey, The Bergen Museum of Art and Science, Finding Freedom: 40 Years of Soviet and Russian Art, 2003
London, White Space Gallery, Museum of a Woman, 2004

Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell, Peeling Potatoes, Painting Pictures: Women Artists in Post-Soviet Russia, Estonia, and Latvia, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001, pp. 55-57
Femme Art: Women Painting in Russia, XV-XX centuries, Moscow, 2002, p. 295, illustrated

Since the late 1990s, Tania Antoshina has been photographing men, often her husband and their friends, in nude poses derived from canonical examples of modern art by figures such as Gauguin, Manet, and Picasso.

In her carefully arranged photographs, Antoshina upends received notions of art, both Western and Soviet. While women were among the subjects of her sources—which include Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe—they are conspicuously absent from her works. In her photographs, men are seen in poses heretofore associated with women; the former thus become sex objects, or objects of the female gaze. Antoshina reasons that until recently, modern and contemporary art has been a vast museum representing men's desires and ambitions. Furthermore, paintings and posters of women in Soviet Russia often deprived their subjects of their femininity.

In Antoshina's works, there is a sense both of high comedy and total disassociation from what the viewer normally expects. This is exemplified by the present lot, based on the famous work The Turkish Bath (1862) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (Louvre, Paris).