NYAB Event - Courtney Love "And She’s Not Even Pretty"

Courtney Love "And She’s Not Even Pretty"

Fred Torres Collaborations

This event has ended.

Fred Torres Collaborations presents the exhibition Courtney Love And She’s Not Even Pretty. This is the first exhibition of Courtney Love’s drawings, which will feature over 45 works by the artist. A limited edition catalogue has been published on occasion of the exhibition.

Love’s drawings evince romantic hysteria, featuring doll-like women surrounded by Love’s emotionally fraught writing, excerpts of poetry, or compelling music lyrics. The women in works like Room 9 are often tormented, lamenting romances shattered and the devastation of rejection. In other works like March 2010 #2 Dublin sexual desire and the insecurity of new love are pushed to the forefront. The subjects of Love’s drawings are based on the artist’s personal experiences, friends, and her interest in fin de siècle paintings in which women are portrayed as powerful femme fatales, virtuous heroines, or as non-individual beings whose purpose is purely sexual. Through these drawings all of Love’s soul is bared for the viewer - the desire for love and the fear of loss. Working primarily with colored pencil, pastel and watercolor, Love creates highly charged dreamscapes, often containing a vibrant palette filled with gestural forms, and marks that are at times fluid, or compulsive and frenetic, which imbue a deeply moving psychological quality to the works.

"With pure line, color and raw emotion, Courtney Love makes drawings of turmoil and contradictions. Sometimes whimsical and carefree, they too express dark psychological states. Sometimes coy and sexually alluring, they ultimately speak of her vulnerability and longing for fairytale romance. Above all, they show it all, as Courtney always does." - Anne Pasternak, President and Artistic Director, Creative Time.

About Courtney Love
Courtney Love is a musician, actress and artist born in San Francisco, California in 1964. Courtney Love studied fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1980’s and has drawn throughout her life, but only recently decided to exhibit her work. She considers the artists David LaChapelle and Julian Schnabel her mentors in her first professional foray into visual art. In 1986 her role in the film Sid and Nancy caught the attention of Andy Warhol and the editors of Interview magazine and they featured her in a two-page spread as a rising star. Debbie Harry introduced Love on the talk show Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes on MTV (1987) as a “flamboyant rising new star.” She formed the alternative-rock band Hole in 1989. In the 1990s, Love went on to release several successful albums with Hole as well as star in films such as The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) and Man on the Moon (1999). Love played the embodiment of Caligula in Francesco Vezzoli’s Trailer For A Remake Of Gore Vidal’s Caligula (2005), which premiered at the 51st Venice Biennial in 2005 and went on to be exhibited in the Whitney Biennial the following year. Named “the most controversial woman in the history of rock” by Rolling Stone magazine, Love has more recently branched out from music and film to complete projects in fashion and writing. She currently lives and works in New York City.