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The 10 best contemporary still lifes | Culture

The 10 best contemporary still lifes

Art historian Michael Petry chooses works from Marc Quinn and Sharon Core among his favourite contemporary still lifes

Nature Morte: Contemporary Artists Reinvigorate the Still-Life Tradition by Michael Petry is published by Thames & Hudson (£35)

Michael Petry

Sat 19 Oct 2013 17.30 BST First published on Sat 19 Oct 2013 17.30 BST

  • 1665

    Sharon Core, 2011Traditional flower paintings similar to Core’s photograph spoke of beauty and death. The cut blooms were depicted at their peak and every viewer knew that they signalled imminent fading and death, and urged viewers to lead a good life if they wanted an afterlife. Core’s photographs replicate as closely as possible those of 17th-century artists (Ambrosius Bosschaert, Jan Brueghel the Elder), and, striving for authenticity, she grew long-lost or out-of-fashion specimens. She then composed and correctly lit them to appear like paintings and titled them the date of the earlier works (ie 1665)

  • Time After Time: Blow up No 3

    Ori Gersht, 2007Ori Gersht is an Israeli artist who has made a series of photographs and videos called Blow Up. Using extremely fast cameras, he has been able to capture the moment that a floral arrangement (based on a 19th-century still life by Henri Fantin-Latour) explodes. Digital photography has allowed him to capture this instant in 1/6,000 of a second. Gersht contrasts the violence of the explosion with the calm of a traditional still-life painting. All the time, the ongoing (and extremely long) conflict in his homeland hovers slightly out of conceptual view

  • Ollie Monkey

    Peter Jones, 2007Animals have always been depicted in art, showing the wealth of the owner – horses and hunting dogs for the rich, along with heaps of dead rabbits. Foxes were seen as cunning, a randy goat stood in for the devil and a lamb for Christ. And Peter Jones often paints lambs and bunnies, but his major fascination lies with monkeys; not real ones but vintage stuffed toys on the verge of falling apart. Monkeys were traditionally painted to hint at the beast within each man or woman, our link to untamed nature and the sexual danger within us. Jones’s Ollie and all his kin are nearing the end of their lifespan, worn out from love (or neglect), and their vulnerability is doubled because, as still-life subjects, they lie ready for inspectionPhotograph: Courtesy of the artist

  • Black Kites

    Gabriel Orozco, 1997The human skull has appeared in art works as a reminder of death since Roman times and was used in the 16th and 17th centuries as a moral injunction to lead a good (Christian) life. Death was always around the corner. Contemporary artists have also used its powerful imagery – Damien Hirst took a real human skull and cast it in platinum set with 8,601 diamonds in his For the Love of God. He claims it represents a victory over death, but attempts to conquer death only reveal its ultimate power, as seen in the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco’s Black Kites. A quieter, and perhaps more potent work, the artist used a pencil to mark out a map of a lost life. The starkness reminds us that beneath flesh and blood, our own skulls lie hidden – for now

  • The Perfect Hostess

    Rebecca Scott, 2006In her series The Perfect Life (which includes paintings called Oh, it’s a perfect day, and The Perfect Christmas Dinner), Rebecca Scott’s work skewers the “perfect” lives found on the pages of women’s magazines and catalogues. Scott questions the fictional notion that by buying some new tableware she could or should make her home perfect. Scott recognises that these illustrations of domestic bliss are aimed at her, not her male partner. It is her job as a woman, the Perfect Hostess, to provide this unobtainable ideal. She paints these readymade images that hope to instruct her and other women to buy such wares and in doing so disrupts what would otherwise be traditional still lifes

  • A Time and a Place

    Darren Jones, 2011As in a conventional still life, Darren Jones’s A Time and a Place displays the cluster of “personal objects which one accumulates on short trips away from home”, according to the artist. “They exist together only momentarily in the hotel room or friend’s apartment, dispersed, discarded or left behind when we leave”, yet they speak volumes about their invisible owner. Jones’s tableau contains an odd mix of an asthma inhaler, poppers, an energy drink, deodorant, silicon-based Gun Oil lubricant and a ticket to Fire Island hinting at a 21st-century narrative

  • Last Meal on Death Row, Texas (Martin Vegas)

    Mat Collishaw, 2011Mat Collishaw seemingly remakes a 17th-century Dutch still life but as a contemporary photograph. The table is laid with a hearty meal of steak and shrimp while a full glass retreats into the darkness of the background. Martin Vegas is from his series Last Meal on Death Row, Texas where Collishaw staged lavish spreads (and occasionally only a meagre glass of water) depicting the last meals requested by prisoners on death row in America. Each work is named after the prisoner who requested the featured dish before being killed by the state. In 2012, America ranked fifth-highest among countries that kill their own citizens

  • Self

    Marc Quinn, 2006The best-known contemporary still life sculpture is Marc Quinn’s Self. In 1991, he made the first of a series of lifesize casts of his own head, each made from his own blood. Every five years, Quinn makes a new version, having slowly collected his blood so as not to harm his health. Each frozen sculpture is slightly different from the last as he ages and his features change. They are like a series of evolving death masks. Time marks his face, yet a frozen version of that self will live endlessly on (as long as there is electricity). Each version reminds viewers of the artist’s (and their own) impending death

  • Giallina

    Joana Vasconcelos, 2008The snake has long been a symbol of evil in the west, a reminder of Eve’s fall (she always gets the blame), but in Native American culture it represents life, death and rebirth (as seen in the shedding of its skin). Joana Vasconcelos looks to her Portuguese roots in works such as Giallina, which incorporate national handicrafts. She first selects a number of cotton doilies bought from local craftswomen, then dismantles and reassembles them over the surface of a glazed snake. She uses ceramics from the traditional Rafael Bordallo Pinheiro factory, and her “second skin” is sewn together by a specialist team. Vasconcelos’s work conflates Duchamp’s mode of not making with a custom of making by hand in order to question what we conceive of as natural

  • Nature Morte 2

    Cindy Wright, 2010In Cindy Wright’s painting Nature Morte 2, a bloody, gutted fish is coiled within the domestic setting of a child’s goldfish bowl. It sits heavily on a dainty white doily her grandmother might have made and we see the refection of the room on the surface of the bowl. The dead fish’s eye stares out of the frame in an accusatory fashion, confronting viewers about the real nature of the foodstuffs we eat. Her images remind us that eating meat and fish comes at a real cost, the death of once living creatures
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