[NSFW] Grace Graupe-Pillard Has Spent a Lifetime Painting Outsiders

From the anti-war rhetoric of the Dada movement to Banksy’s guerrilla graffiti, art has long been a vehicle for social commentary. Arguably, the most effective works are created by those who have experienced injustice firsthand. For artist Grace Graupe-Pillard, it was the shadow of the Holocaust that shaped her voice into what would become a lengthy career of dissident, anti-establishment art. She is a first-generation child of Holocaust survivors who lost 70 family members to genocide.

“My childhood was spent hearing many stories from my parents about the horror of loss, so I have always empathized with the ‘outsiders’ whose lives have been bruised or shaken,” she tells Creators.

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BILL II, 56″X40″, OIL/CANVAS, 1979. All images courtesy the artist

Over a span of 40 years, Graupe-Pillard’s art has challenged the notions of classical and establishment art in favor of a realist perspective that honors the average and gives voice to the disenfranchised by employing a “female gaze.”

Most known for her feminist stance, Graupe-Pillard strives to showcase the body, both male and female, as a means of portraying equality. She says, “Searching for the beauty in the mundane, choosing people of all ages, genders, ethnicities—their flesh reflecting life’s imprint—far from the classical idealization of the nude, but rather ‘naked,’ baring all to my brush and canvas.”

STELLA, 91″X56.6″, OIL/CANVAS, 1977 Graupe-Pillard: “I was attracted to Stella because of her stretch marks and curious about the signs of childbirth on a woman’s body.”

In her early large-scale pastel drawings, she focused on subjects who did not “fit into the dictates of the ‘gaze’ of the male-dominated art history/museum network.” Her subjects were friends or strangers she’d confronted in public because she liked their look. In the paintings below, Graupe-Pillard rendered Spike Lee’s sister, whom she approached at a restaurant in SoHo in the early 80s, and in a more recent painting from 2015 is one of her favorite “found” models, a server from a diner she frequents in New Jersey. Graupe-Pillard is determined to diversify fine art and in this way her work represents the milieu of America. “I wanted the ‘canon’ of art history to include bodies that most folks would be familiar with and recognize as their own,” she says of her portraiture.

HANK, 84″X48″, OIL/CANVAS, 1981 – Graupe-Pillard: “Hank was a homeless man living in an old VW Van in Freehold, NJ where I maintained a studio.”

Graupe-Pillard turns her lens inward as well. After working mostly with pastel portraiture in the 80s and 90s, she took up photography, which informed her practice in an entirely new way. She began to focus on self-portraiture, as is the case in her series, Self-Portrait As Blonde, where she first photographed herself naked and in various poses wearing a blond wig and sunglasses to “perpetuate anonymity and an infusion of ersatz ‘glamour.'” She then created large-scale paintings from the photographs. In a more recent and ongoing series, Grace Delves Into Art, she records herself naked in her studio employing unnatural movements then selects stills and inserts herself into “approved” art across disciplines. In this way she seeks to comment on the underrepresented body.

SELF PORTRAIT AS A BLONDE, 90″X214″ (5 PANELS), OIL/ALKYD/CANVAS, 2012-2014

“Now that I am a senior citizen,” she says, “I continue to investigate my body as I have done over the years, inasmuch as the aging torso is considered by many to be invisible and unpalatable.”

In a series entitled, MANIPULATION//DISPLACED, she manipulates sourced photographs and journalism into abstract portraits of war and its collateral damage, which she then paints onto canvas. “I see the world through filters, more aptly through a veil,” she says, “which gives me the distance I need to approach difficult subject matter.”

NAUMAN’S 5 MARCHING MEN AND GRACE, PHOTO PRINT ON LUSTER PAPER, 28″X48″, 2013 Graupe-Pillard: “Based on a 1985 neon piece by Bruce Nauman.”

But perhaps her most well-known series—certainly the most definitive of her early life influences—is Nowhere To Go, a series she created in collaboration with her parents that depicts her personal experience with the Holocaust. “The title of this series originated from my father,” she recalls, “whose inability to save his own parents created a feeling of unimaginable guilt, which remained with him throughout his life.”

Graupe-Pillard’s utilization of the female gaze as a means of encompassing a broader spectrum of humanity and highlighting social injustices challenges the oftentimes narrowly defined range of the contemporary art world at large. In doing so, she has established a niche that embraces, not only the disenfranchised and the mundane, but also, in her words, “a ‘senior’ old enough to be on Medicare, unafraid of my body, long after society has given up on it.”

DAFUR/SUDAN, OIL/ALKYD/WOOD 40″X90″ (3 PANELS,) 2013

TRUCKLOAD, OIL/ALKYD/WOOD,48″X36″, 2014

To learn more about the artist click here

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Source: vice.com

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