Alevtina Kahidze. My Husband’s Eyes Are Like Those of Jeanne Samary, 2003. Installation (photograph, reproduction of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s painting Full-Length Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary (1878), slideshow)

Description

Alevtina Kakhidze’s work My Husband’s Eyes Are Like Those of Jeanne Samary was created for the group exhibition “Tenderness” at the Center for Contemporary Art at NaUKMA, which also featured Bogna Burska, Margaryta Zynets, and Nikoleta Marković (curated by Olesya Ostrovska-Lyuta). The artist based her work on the painting Full-Length Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary (1878) by French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, focusing on the fragment showing the actress’s eyes. These eyes reminded Kakhidze of her husband’s, whose eyes she cut out from a photograph and juxtaposed with Renoir’s reproduction fragment in a slide show projection at the exhibition. This piece is one of Kakhidze’s early works to initiate a feminist line in her practice: the artist sought to question the role of the muse traditionally assigned to women in the history of art.