Transpositions: The Invisible Body

Julie Rrap interrogates her experiences as a female artist and employs various strategies – humour, performance and criticism – to disrupt the patriarchal paradigm of art history. Since the early 1980s she has consistently explored feminist ideas relating to the male-determined gaze of the Western art-historical canon.

In Transpositions: The Invisible Body Rrap draws attention to the erasure of

the identity of unnamed models in well-known paintings – from the Renaissance to modernism. Rrap crops the paintings and re-presents the women as portraits, each face tightly framed and reproduced at life size. Her uniform presentation of each face – using photographic emulsion on wood – emphasises the solidarity of the women. In 2007 Rrap described her motivation for making the work: ‘I gathered history in one attacking phalanx’. Her strategy, implied by the work’s title, challenges the status of the women as invisible figures in history, transforming them into a wall of gazes staring at the viewer.

Rrap conceived the work to be exhibited in flexible configurations in columns on wooden pillars, including at its first showing at the Sydney Biennale in 1988. As Victoria Lynn noted in 2007, ‘This flexibility of display comes to underscore the meaning of the work itself – the idea that one can reverse or alter the positions or order in which things stand’.

Maria Zagala, Associate Curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs