Bowdoin College Museum of Art | - Pain Body (Shingles Paintings)

Preview image of work. watercolor on Awagami Hakuho paper, Pain Body (Shingles Paintings) 38755

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Pain Body (Shingles Paintings)

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Artist

Andrea Dezsö (Satu-Mare, Romania, 1968 - )

Title

Pain Body (Shingles Paintings)

Creation Date

2019

Century

early 21st century

Dimensions

20 1/2 x 17 in. (52.07 x 43.18 cm)

Object Type

watercolor

Creation Place

North America, United States

Medium and Support

watercolor on Awagami Hakuho paper

Credit Line

Courtesy of the Artist

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

The uncanny figures in the Shingles Paintings express an intrusion of the unfamiliar during Dezsö’s struggle with the shingles virus. Diverging from her practice of carefully layered compositions, these raw and turbulent watercolors translate the unsettling feeling of being invaded with invisible pain and internal distress into a language of images. The distortion and doubling of recognizable bodily forms, disordered interactions between colors and shapes, and ambiguous space of the stark background all express ways in which the experience of self in the body and the mind is vulnerable to the disruption of unknown and unseen forces. How do we experience ourselves as embodied? What control do we have over our bodies? What separates or connects our bodies from or to the world around them? Can we experience our bodies as something other than ourselves? How can experiences of the body redefine the self?