Male Statuary is a series of watercolour paintings, originally published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, in March 2015. Drawing imagery from the 1959 book The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, by Kenneth Clark, Shapton repurposes old pictures to new ends. In Male Statuary she recontextualizes the notion of a ‘Renaissance Man’, and the idealized male sculptural form, reclaiming the female gaze and repositioning the nude male squarely for objectification.
Leanne Shapton, b. 1973, is a Canadian author, artist, and publisher based in New York City. Shapton’s Swimming Studies won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, and was long listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2012. She is the co-founder, with photographer Jason Fulford, of J&L Books, an internationally-distributed not-for-profit imprint specializing in art and photography books. Her works have appeared in various publications such as The New York Times, Granta, and The New Yorker, and she teaches in the creating writing department at Columbia University School of the Arts. Shapton is a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Her latest book is Guestbook, a collection of short stories.
Watercolor on paper
Unique
