Your Cheeks Are Wine

Basel | ArtRegion: Basel - Oberrhein
Olivia Sterling: Your Cheeks Are Wine
Meyer Riegger in Basel
25. Mai – 13. Juli 2024
Art Basel Week Hours (10-16 June 2024): Mon-Sat 12-20 ★Tue until 21 |
Knocked over red wine glasses, half-empty green bottles, leftover spare ribs, cakes and uncontrolled figures offer a fragmented snapshot of the visual world that Olivia Sterling (b. 1996 in Peterborough, UK) lays before us at Meyer Riegger in Basel. It is as though we viewers were on a first date in a restaurant or flirting at the bar ourselves. Framed by intimate bodily relationships or people interacting, the new paintings are a colourful spectacle of various desires – and power structures: with barely any full faces on display, the bodily postures and hand gestures convey both insatiable desire and repulsion.
The colour red plays a special role here, accentuating the table, dress, wall, floor, chair and especially the wine. With its connotations of blood, it introduces a corporeal dimension. While the pulsating luminosity of the colour initially seems tantalising, its warning intensity underscores an ambivalence that pervades the paintings. It appears as if the figures are embarrassed and trying to flee the frame or to absent themselves. Their merriment is accompanied by shame as well as prohibition and disgust. Exuberance and discomfort are closely intertwined in these ordinary nightlife scenes. This is emphasised by the strong colours, which clash and form high-contrast fields of paint framed by dark contours. While the people in the images are eating and drinking in public places, they become remarkably similar to what they are consuming.
Sterling forces us to look closely and to recognise the power dynamics that emerge in romantic tête-à-têtes: objectification and consumption often go hand in hand. The way dating and attractiveness are evaluated is therefore often political and part of a power structure that includes race, gender and social status as its assessment criteria. Physical matter (blood and flesh) is often compared with edible things. Notions about who gets to eat what and the social attribution of food to certain groups have a long history: consider, for example, foods coded as feminine, or politicians who blame veganism for the ‘crisis of masculinity’. These seemingly frivolous moments of drunken conviviality and the ‘consumption’ within the images correspond to the objectifying gaze of white supremacy, comparing bodies to food or wanting to ‘devour’ someone inferior, like an inappropriate date with a stranger. Sterling explores this hierarchy by assigning each object and skin tone a specific place in the piece. With recurring shades of red, brown, pink and white, she creates connections that she systematises with letters (B=Black, P=Pink, W=White, R=Red, G=Green).
The exhibition title is similarly paradigmatic: your cheeks are reddened, drinkable like wine – but at the same time, rosy cheeks are indicative of white people, emphasising that the white body is often considered the standard when judging bodies. Whether read as a flirty observation or a suggestive comment, it is another conflation of food and corporeality. According to Sterling, it’s ‘as though someone’s inner world was pulled out of them and placed on their cheeks’.
The current series thus brings existential questions and bleak situations to the fore, reinforcing the feeling of alienation: the inner-private and outer-public worlds collide, the desire for physical intimacy, uninhibited public drunkenness combined with acquiescent passivity, the search for affirmation through compliments that only reinforce objectification. The images convey an unease or a sadness that permeates the entire ‘date’, leading to awkward situations and bad behaviour. The stark alternation between exuberant partying and being disgusted or embarrassed by offensive and objectifying comments as well as the awareness of the inner world through the outer one is inherent in the images, though veiled by Sterling’s typically cartoonish aesthetic.
Text: Tuula Rasmussen
Öffnungszeiten
Mi-Sa 13-17
Galerie Mueller
Rebgasse 46
4058 Basel