Elsa Dax
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Elsa Dax (born May 14, 1972), is a French painter and a member of the Stuckists art movement.
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[edit] Life and career
Elsa Dax was born in Paris, and educated at the Sorbonne with a MA in cinema. In 1994, she worked as a production assistant for the film Beyond the Clouds, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. In 1995 she was a librarian in the Pompidou Centre. In 1996 she was a production assistant for the Musee D'Orsay for the film Whistler, an American in Paris. 1997-98, she rented a 3 sq metre room in a convent, containing just a bed, a small cupboard and a tap. She spent her time there painting, "and I was very happy".
In 2000, she joined the Stuckists, the radical anti-conceptual art movement co-founded by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson. She first exhibited with them in their The Real Turner Prize Show at the Pure Gallery, Shoreditch, London, in that year, and participated in their first demonstration outside Tate Britain against the Turner Prize. She also took part in other demonstrations in subsequent years.
In 2001 she founded the Paris Stuckists and organised the first Paris show of the Stuckists at the Musee d'Adzak: this included the artist Stella Vine (later made famous by Charles Saatchi), who at that time was a member of the Stuckist group. Dax continued to exhibit regularly with the Stuckists and in 2004 she was a featured artist at their definitive exhibition, The Stuckists Punk Victorian, at the Walker Art Gallery during the Liverpool Biennial. She promoted the second Paris Stuckist show in 2005.
In 2005, she illustrated a children's book. In 2006, the Tarot Museum in Bologna acquired a Tarot deck, which she had designed in 1999.
She spends her time divided between Camden in London and a flat in Paris. She is now a full-time artist. As well as painting her own work, she is also a collector of other Stuckist paintings by Ella Guru, Charles Thomson, Bill Lewis, Philip Absolon, Remy Noe and Ruth Stein.
[edit] Art
The themes in her paintings are almost wholly devoted to those found in Greek mythology, and compose a mass of figurative detail. She respects the force of nature. She has said of her work:
| I want people to have time to daydream with my paintings. You can't rape them. You have to penetrate them. You have to make love with the eyes. At first sight, you see a shape; at second sight you see another shape. You need to sit down and explore. You need to find the time in this fast food society. I want to activate the imagination of the person who's looking at it. It's like hyper-text: I can give a kind of direction, but it's up to the viewer to perceive their own interpretation. |
[edit] Sources
- Ed. Katherine Evans (2000), "The Stuckists" Victoria Press, ISBN 0-907165-27-3
- Ed. Frank Milner (2004), "The Stuckists Punk Victorian" National Museums Liverpool, ISBN 1-902700-27-9
