Details:
① Artwork:
The Sturdy Calf
This painting depicts a mother and child figure intertwined. The artist is a new mother herself, and her artwork is informed by both the massive upheaval of becoming a parent and the experience of witnessing her own mother’s death from cancer. This work is held in an artist frame. Challenging the conventional frame's rigid utilitarianism led the artist into a gratifying exploration of materiality and decoration, as well as ideas related to protection, security and beauty.
Rainen Knecht employs a form of dream logic to examine beauty, humor and horror. The artist's work depicts figures situated between warrior princess and sturdy milkmaid—hybrid feminine figures that playfully enact feminist revenge fantasies as they lounge, bend or contort into suggestive puzzles. Knecht's sexy, angry, ugly and funny figures are unbound by convention. They both seduce and offend, and are frequently depicted as amply endowed but with withering or oversized appendages. Knecht's figures question the line between alien and real, human and animal, self and other.
Specs:
② Offered by:
③ Artist:
The figures in Rainen Knecht’s paintings question the line between alien and real, human and animal, self and other. The artist employs a form of dream logic to examine beauty, humor and horror in works that are simultaneously sexy, angry, ugly and funny. Knecht’s hybrid, feminine figures—situated between warrior princess and sturdy milkmaid—playfully enact feminist revenge fantasies as they lounge, bend or contort into suggestive puzzles.
BIO:
Rainen Knecht was born in 1982. The artist received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, California in 2006.
Solo exhibitions of Knecht’s work include: R U my mother? at Fourteen30 Contemporary in Portland, Oregon (2021); Attitude Problem at CAPITAL in San Francisco, California (2018); and Daydream of Darkness, a two-person exhibition with Nicola L at SITUATIONS in New York City (2018).
Group exhibitions that have shown Knecht’s work include: Milk of the Poppy at CAPITAL in San Francisco, California; Geranium at Stems Gallery in Brussels, Belgium; Hecate at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles, California; Chimera at Fisher Parrish in Brooklyn, New York; Turn back! Turn back! at Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles, California; and Run with the Wolves at The Pit in Los Angeles, California.
In 2021, Knecht was awarded the Hallie Ford Fellowship.
Knecht lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
This painting depicts a mother and child figure intertwined. The artist is a new mother herself, and her artwork is informed by both the massive upheaval of becoming a parent and the experience of witnessing her own mother’s death from cancer.More
- Framed: 36.8 x 31.0 x 1.0 in.
- Signed
