Reductive Overture

Zära Monet’s paintings have been featured in LA Weekly, Huffington Post, Manifest, Juxtapoz and Beautiful Bizarre publications. She has been awarded sixteen solo shows and forty seven selected group exhibitions, including Museum of Art and History: Lancaster and Carnegie Art Museum: Oxnard.

Monet’s paintings re-examine academic compositions, the male gaze and socio-sexual empowerment issues. Creating a composite overlay of old master portrait paintings, the work bends the narrative into contemporary notions of feminism and patriarchal authority. Meticulously controlling the play between the subject and the space it occupies, the work is able to guide, critique and call into question the intention of the viewers’ gaze. The subjects are posed, the color schema is non-naturalistic, the spatial play is ambiguous. She skews the locus of composition, reverses the light logic, exploits value relationships all in hopes to present a mysteriously contrived yet intriguing aesthetic.