NYAB Event - Moyna Flannigan "Sphinx"

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At Sara Meltzer Gallery
Media: Painting

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Among Scotland's leading figurative painters, Flannigan's genre of portraiture is based on the mood of our time as depicted in fictional characters. Her paintings, works on paper and miniatures are characterized by a lavish imagination, dark humor and a probing critique of the effects of power on personal, cultural and political alienation in the modern world. Flannigan's influences are drawn from a range of historic sources - from the characters in commedia del'arte (Comedy of Art) and the films of Federico Fellini, to the paintings of Francisco Goya and Otto Dix, to the slapstick and the popular. Curious to Flannigan is the inherent difference between how one seems or appears, as opposed to how one truly is.

Perhaps her most introspective body of work yet, the Sphinx paintings have been pared to a minimum of colors and forms: to a lone woman at the edge of darkness. The woman's mouth sometimes appears open wide, a black hole in place of a scream. Although she appears a physical entity, both beautiful and seemingly eternal, she is inscrutable. Flannigan's Sphinxes bend, stand and walk, as if to suggest a precautionary evolutionary tale centered on the axis of good/evil. Having its origins in Ancient Egyptian mythology, the seated sphinx is a zoomorphic mythological figure associated with the role of guardian and protector of deity and temple. In Greek mythology the sphinx, commonly depicted upright, is a guardian figure and her mystery being that only she can reveal the riddle of life. In Flannigan's Sphinx series the women are not still; the paint conspires in its intense application to amplify restlessness, evade accurate description or portrayal and yet unwittingly reveal a sense of self.

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