Educated in Buenos Aires, where she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Lea Lublin initially painted canvases in an expressionist style with a political content. In 1963, she was associated with the Visual Arts Centre in Buenos Aires, which championed an experimental avant-garde art. In 1965, she left Argentina for good and settled in Paris, where she put an end to her career as a painter. In that same year, she produced the series Voir clair, an assemblage of repainted reproductions fitted with windscreen wipers, inviting the public to get away from their conditioned reactions to mythical and heroic figures (Voir clair, la Joconde aux essuie-glaces). In 1969, she involved the public in multi-sensory circuits. With Dehors/dedans le musée (Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago de Chile, 1971), her installation made it possible to pass physically through those cultural myths called paintings and question the conflicts between social and artistic breaks. During a performance titled Dissolution dans l’eau (1978), the artist tossed into the Seine a large banner on which were written various prejudices about women. In 1979, at the Yvon Lambert gallery, she showed Le Milieu du tableau, a set of drawings and texts on canvas made around the figure of Artemisia Gentileschi*, a 17th century painter, and the picture of her portraying Judith Beheading Holophernes - the sword becoming a penis forcing a woman, a grim evocation of the rape which Gentileschi was herself a victim of. That exhibition was a turning point in the artist’s work: from then on, memory, conscious or above all hidden, became the main subject of her oeuvre. In the same spirit, the artist echoed the analyses of the art historian Leo Steinberg about Christ’s sexuality, based on the Italian Renaissance (La Sexualité du Christ dans l’art de la Renaissance et son refoulement moderne, 1983). So in 1983 her series Le Strip-tease de l’Enfant-Dieu shown at the Yvon Lambert gallery explored the eroticism which informs representations of the infant Jesus in Renaissance paintings.
Fabienne DUMONT
See this illustrated text on the website of the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
