Meet the Artist: Elene Usdin

Mathilde d'apres Picasso

Saturday, February 27, 2010 (1-4PM) @ Farmani Gallery
111 Front St., Ste. 212, DUMBO, Brooklyn, New York

Femmes d’Interieur
Photography and Illustrations
On View through March 27, 2010

Please join us at the Farmani Gallery as we host an occasion to meet and converse with Paris based artist, Elene Usdin on Saturday, February 27, 2010, from 1-4PM about her latest series Femmes D’Interieur. Usdin, who has already shown this series at the Gallery of Graphic Arts in Paris, is making her New York debut with this exhibition. This series features one of a kind mixed media artworks as well as collaged photographic images, which have emerged from Usdin’s keen and stylish sensibilities for photography and illustration. Adding her charm to each brilliant piece, she reinterprets the women made prominent in the Renaissance paintings from the Masters such as Ingres, Raphael, and Velazquez and adds her personal wit and whimsy to a social observation of women as the decorations within their own domesticated situations.

In Femmes D’Interieur, Usdin meticulously combines her talents of illustration and photography to produced exquisite and delightfully detailed unique artworks. Each piece begins as a staged scene where eventually Usdin hand illustrates and paints, with acrylic paint directly onto the photograph, the re-imagined portrait of the Renaissance woman. In these modern scenes she reincarnates these women by morphing their bodies onto common household objects and treating them as part of the decorative elements found in the home. This offbeat examination of “woman-as-object” is at one time unsettling and yet Usdin has the ability to convey this strong subject matter with a sense of enchantment in her chic artworks. It is has been said of Usdin’s work, “it is always about women – the women of fairytales, of mythology, and of fantasy,” and she provides that same ideology in this series.

Usdin, began her artistic career as an illustrator for books and magazines in France and U.S. newspapers such as The Boston Globe and The New York Times. She turned to photography in 2002, experimenting with self-portraiture and soon after collaborated with Hartland Villa on a poster campaign for the Opera du Rhin in France. This led to  successes in her photography career, focusing her lens and creativity to editorial and fashion shoots for magazines. Currently Usdin is a member of the creative collective Hartland Villa that includes art directors Lionel Avignon and Stefan Vivies and was recently awarded with the London Photographic Associations Gold in Fashion for the fair-etale series. She has also been awarded the 2008 Px3 Prix De La Photographie Paris and the International Photography Awards honorable mention for her earlier series “Self Portrait with Mattress.” Her editorial and fashion work can also be seen in Eyemazing, Twill, and The World Magazine. 

The exhibition will be on view until March 27, 2010 and features both unique mix media C-prints, which are hand painted with acrylic by the artist as well as a small edition of  photographic collaged artworks. All artworks are mounted on aluminum. Also available during the exhibition is a limited edition (5 in edition) of Femmes D’Interieur Petit Artist Box Set  featuring 10- 8”x6” C-prints, with a signed certificate of authenticity by artist. For more information please call the gallery at 718-578-4478 or e-mail info@farmanigallery.com.