My Celebrities
As part of a new series of artistic interventions and responses to the museum collection and permanent displays, Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery has invited Jemisha Maadhavji to create a unique installation of her ‘My Celebrities’ series of paintings in the Long Gallery and the Collections Gallery.
Flower Me, 2022
Jemisha Maadhavji (b. 1996)
Oil and gold medium on canvas with curtain pole, rug and chair 245x214cm
Jemisha Maadhavji (b.1996) is a figurative painter whose artworks are informed by bold colour, pattern, and fashion, exploring themes of desire and luxury, whilst questioning how beauty is defined in the 21st century. Maadhavji is not interested in painting famous people; her interest is in those who are unknown to her and to the world. In this exhibition, her paintings present a central Indian male-presenting protagonist, holding flowers and gazing straight at the viewer, seated in formal or playful positions on a chair.
“For me my models are my celebrities, my Icons. They are people I find unique. I don’t really think about the likeness when I’m painting them, it’s just a process of discovering who they are and how I see them and what they mean to me. This is what painting does: it discovers the subject through paint and that’s what I feel l’m doing when I am painting my subjects.”
Within the Collections Gallery, the artist plays with perspective and painterly illusion by hand-painting an 18th Century Chinoiserie-inspired yellow mural on the wall upon which she hangs four highly detailed oil paintings. And in the Long Art Gallery, Maadhavji places props from her studio in front of a painting hung from a curtain rail, provoking the interplay between the artwork and viewer again.
