![]() ![]() “A big media strike swept through the Russian internet with mottos “free Yulia” and “female body is not pornography”,” Avstreyh explained. At the time, their fellow Russian artist Yulia Tsvetkova was facing six years in prison for posting her feminist, nude artwork on social media. This daily practice may have been cathartic on a personal level, but it also had a deeply political dimension. “We wanted to paint, and we wanted to perform an experiment to learn how far can you push the boundaries of mutual trust with somebody you don’t really know. “We wanted to reclaim the intimacy of video calls,” Avstreyh told Dazed last year. Although they didn’t know one another well when the project began, Videochat: Send Nudes (2020) evolved from these sessions of spending time together, remotely. Olya Avstreyh and Jenya Milyukos met at art school in Moscow and, when quarantine began, they wanted to carry on making art in a way that felt collaborative. VIDEOCHAT: SEND NUDES, OLYA AVSTREYH AND JENYA MILYUKOSĪmid a background of the pandemic and a puritanical climate of state-enforced censorship in Russia, two students began a daily ritual of video calling and painting nude portraits of each other while they talked. Below, take a look at some of the artworks dismantling and re-framing the concept and meaning of the nude. On this theme, we’ve collected some of the best art and photography working to explode and expand traditional artistic depictions of the human body. While many of Lucian Freud’s unflinching studies of his bare subjects would probably epitomise what Kenneth Clark might regard, in polarising definition, as the abject naked form. Egon Schiele’s nudes are infused with a febrile desire absent from the classical depictions of nudity. Inspired by African masks and Iberian sculpture, Picasso’s monumental painting “Demoiselles d'Avignon” (1907) features a group of prostitutes rendered with angular, stylised bodies. Later, artists have continually been drawn to reinterpreting the classical nude in various ways. When we think of the nude in western art we’re likely to imagine the idealised classical figures of gods and heroes in ancient Greece, or Titian’s sensual depictions of female bodies in 16th century Italy. This notion of the ‘nude’ as an ideal of beauty, as opposed to the ‘naked’ body (our unclothed human self in all its unguarded realness), has persisted in depictions of the human form through the ages. ![]() “The vague image it (the nude) projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed.” “The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude,” wrote art critic Kenneth Clark in his seminal work, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art. ![]()
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