Claire Partington: Princess
Mindy Solomon is pleased to present Princess, a solo exhibition of United Kingdom based artist Claire Partington. Her show takes inspiration from the world of Disney princesses and social media influencers, while referencing the pressures placed on physical appearance and the luxurious “fairy tale lifestyle”.
Partington states: “My work is meticulously hand built using traditional ceramic techniques, referencing material traditions from folk-art earthenware to renaissance terracottas, and Della Robbia to Meissen porcelain, with the imagery drawn from fairytales and folklore to art history, social history and contemporary social media. Predominantly focusing on women and the female experience, my figurative works offer a sense of familiarity and tradition, but the enlarged scale combined with a reassessed narrative and power dynamics, create figures that inhabit their own uncanny and distinct world.
I have a magpie approach to creating my work, taking references from diverse and changing sources, but I am particularly interested with portraits and their symbolism and how people have chosen and choose to present themselves – be it a 17th Century painting or a contemporary social media filtered selfie. The careful placement of objects of importance, the clothes and the personal appearance are all very strongly directed and reflect the sitters desire to convey a message of status and power. I use repeated motifs in my work that relate to the symbols of portraiture and art history, and the motifs we choose to represent ourselves with every day in our choices of personal presentation, and merge these with the fantastical and surreal worlds of traditional narratives to create my own social commentary.”
Renaissance inspired, with a nod to the artists Lucas Cranach and Luca Della Robbia, each work presents the viewer with an opportunity to revisit a time of castles and grandiose cathedrals where perfection is next to Godliness and aspirations for more were limited to the privileged few. In Partington’s Princess, the magic is only a scroll away.
About Claire Partington
Based in London (UK), Claire Partington is best known for her large-scale ceramic figures and installations. After studying sculpture at Central Saint Martins in the 1990’s she moved away from making art to pursue a career in the museums and galleries that had initially inspired her interest in art and design, notably working at the V&A museum, the British Library, and the Wellcome Collection. Following a change of career a decade later, she returned to making and attended ceramics classes at night school, where she began to make illustrative and narrative figurative works that draw on her interests in art and social history, mixed with a contemporary social commentary and sense of the surreal.
Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major public collections including the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, National Museums Scotland, Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of London, Seattle Art Museum, Ömer Koç Collection, Istanbul and the Reyden Weiss Collection in Germany. She was awarded a Contemporary Art Society Commission in 2022 with the Walker Art Gallery, and was the recipient of the Virginia A Groot award in 2018.
