Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph.
The figure seen from behind is one of painting’s oldest devices, the Rückenfigur that German Romantics posted at a valley’s edge so we would look where she looked. Cig Harvey borrows the pose and withholds the payoff: this woman in a sleeveless white dress has turned not toward a sublime prospect but into bare April woods, her dark curly hair falling as a slender magnolia sapling rises in front of her face. We are denied the view and given the tree instead.
What the sapling offers is extravagant and slightly absurd: dozens of white star-magnolia blossoms strung along thin branches, each lit as if from within against a forest so dark it reads nearly black. One blossom rests on her bare shoulder, another hangs near her waist, so flower and body seem briefly to share the same fragile stem. The dead grass at her feet still remembers winter; the tree has decided otherwise, insisting on beauty before the surrounding woods have agreed.
Harvey, British-born and long settled on the Maine coast where this was made, has built her work from exactly this collision of the domestic and the strange, gathered in books such as You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet and collected across American museums. The archival pigment print holds the near-blacks without letting them close, so the magnolia keeps its faint glow. You could call it a portrait, though the sitter has stepped aside for the flowers. The better word might be substitution, tender and unnerving, of one white thing for another.
The figure seen from behind is one of painting’s oldest devices, the Rückenfigur that German Romantics posted at a valley’s edge so we would look where she looked. Cig Harvey borrows the pose and withholds the payoff: this woman in a sleeveless white dress has turned not toward a sublime prospect but into bare April woods, her dark curly hair falling as a slender magnolia sapling rises in front of her face. We are denied the view and given the tree instead.
What the sapling offers is extravagant and slightly absurd: dozens of white star-magnolia blossoms strung along thin branches, each lit as if from within against a forest so dark it reads nearly black. One blossom rests on her bare shoulder, another hangs near her waist, so flower and body seem briefly to share the same fragile stem. The dead grass at her feet still remembers winter; the tree has decided otherwise, insisting on beauty before the surrounding woods have agreed.
Harvey, British-born and long settled on the Maine coast where this was made, has built her work from exactly this collision of the domestic and the strange, gathered in books such as You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet and collected across American museums. The archival pigment print holds the near-blacks without letting them close, so the magnolia keeps its faint glow. You could call it a portrait, though the sitter has stepped aside for the flowers. The better word might be substitution, tender and unnerving, of one white thing for another.