#nubritannia

New Britannia: Reinventing British Iconography a series of paintings by Rachel Maggart, exploring the melting pot of ideas and images in Britain today

Image List

Modern Love, 2015

oil, varnish and ink on canvas 70 x 100 cm (27 ⅗ x 39 ⅜ in)

£3,000

David Bowie's Aladdin Sane alter ego and characters from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream interlock in a stained glass window of Southwark Cathedral. The title Modern Love (also a track from Bowie's 1983 album, Let's Dance), rainbow colours and androgyny allude to changing mores around sexuality in Britain. Objects of desire and devotion, pop idols and demigods become indistinguishable.

Paper Doll, 2015

oil, varnish and ink on canvas 70 x 100 cm (27 ⅗ x 39 ⅜ in)

£2,500

Paper Doll departs from a 1994 gelatin silver print by Glen Luchford of Kate Moss, striking an odalisque pose in a dumpy hotel room. In the painting, a body of water inspired by Roni Horn's lithographic series, Still Water (The River Thames, For Example) (1999), replaces a bed, portraying Moss as a weightless origami. Symbols of high and low culture turn upside down.

Vanitas, 2015 oil on canvas

70 x 100 cm (27 ⅗ x 39 ⅜ in) £3,000

Vanitas is Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998), scrambled and placed on a cornflower blue backdrop, derived from a microscopic image of white blood cells attacking gonorrhoeal bacteria. Private subject matter in a historically sacrosanct space, My Bed exposed lingering expectations of what constitutes art. Gonorrhoea as incurable is thought to have been conditioned in the Vietnam War by American soldiers, who overused antibiotics to protect against contracting the venereal disease in Asian brothels. Vanitas, referring to the unimposing genre of 17th-century Dutch painting, examines notions of vulnerability and exposure, safety and risk.

Red Dot, 2015 oil on canvas

70 x 100 cm (27 ⅗ x 39 ⅜ in) £2,500

Reinterpreting “the world is your oyster”, Red Dot superimposes Yinka Shonibare's Boy on a Globe (head lost in the clouds) on a Turneresque seascape. The painting pays homage to J.M.W. Turner's mythologised, extemporaneous red buoy in Helvoetsluys, The City Of Utrecht, 64, Going To Sea (1832), vying for attention next to John Constable’s ruddy The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (‘Whitehall Stairs, June 18th, 1817’) at 1832 Royal Academy exhibition.

Meat Your Maker, 2015

oil on canvas 70 x 100 cm (27 ⅗ x 39 ⅜ in)

£2,500

Meat Your Maker borrows from The Clash's 1979 London Calling album cover, immortalising Paul Simonon smashing his Fender Precision against The Palladium stage in New York. The starting point of the painting was Roast Foundation's initiative of rehabilitating youth offenders by employing them in kitchens; or, channeled rage. Though the music of The Clash became an emblem of punk rock rebellion, retrospectively the group are seen to have been manufactured: a commercial boy band or “piece of meat”.

#nubritannia

Queen, 2015

oil and varnish on canvas 100 x 70 cm (39 ⅜ x 27 ⅗ in)

£2,500

Queen evokes a photograph of Freddie Mercury, enrobed and holding up a crown triumphantly, at Queen’s last performance in 1986. By 1987, the public disclosure of Mercury's AIDS diagnosis had superceded his musical legacy in tabloid press, chronicling his rapidly expiring body. Mercury's ravaged image betrays a malignant hysteria around around celebrity sparing not even England's Matriarch, both consecrated and desecrated in turn, as a sacred repository of history and tourist trap.

Shoot, 2015 oil on canvas

100 x 70 cm (27 ⅗ x 39 ⅜ in) £3,000

Shoot originates in a still from Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film, Blow-Up, based on David Bailey's Swinging London life, and an aerial photograph of the 2005 Buncefield oil depot explosion. In Blow-Up, a fashion photographer captures a murder on film, insinuating the postmodern trope “death of the subject”, ancillary to the theme of female objectification running through the film. Implicating normalised violence, Shoot is an oblique reference to Chris Burden's eponymous 1971 performance piece, in which the artist took a bullet to his arm, in the context of the Vietnam War, "wanting to know what it felt like".

Birds, 2015

oil on canvas 100 x 70 cm (39 ⅜ x 27 ⅗ in)

Birds reimagines Steve McCurry's Pigeon feeding near blue mosque (2001), taken in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan. Doves, calling to mind the dialectic of war and peace, fly freely around a statuesque figure, their blurry forms in the foreground reflecting her vantage through a fabric partition. Marching ad infinitum into the horizon, they lend the painting (named after Hitchcock's film) an ominous tone.

Fresh Ness, 2015

oil on canvas 100 x 70 cm (27 ⅗ x 39 ⅜ in)

£2,500

In Fresh Ness, a gold-fanged Loch Ness sea monster "rears her head" next to a strand of royal diamonds. Foregrounding retro block letters on an abandoned Brixton fishmonger's storefront, the Queen's gemstones appear like "rocks", or re-appropriated status symbols. Fresh Ness paralells Scotland and gentrified Brixton, both hotspots of socioeconomic tension, protesting imbalances of power.

Alice in Acid House, 2015

oil on canvas 100 x 70 cm (27 ⅗ x 39 ⅜ in)

£2,500

Alice in Acid House collages an 1858 albumen silver print from glass negative of Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll's muse for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with elements of David Hockney's Astray (2009). In his fairy tale, Carroll renders English countryside as if through a psychedelic lens, eliciting theories about his imagination aided by hallucinogenic drugs. In Hockney's supernatural landscape, severed tree trunks like charred cigarette butts lend new meaning to the phrase "trail blazing". Acid house, a musical subgenre of the 1980s rave scene, shares Hockney's fluorescent palette. One etymology of the moniker "acid house" holds that the term acid was a slang word for stealing and invoked the DJ’s habit of liberally incorporating copyright tracks, although LSD (a.k.a. “acid”) is bound up in perceptions of the listener’s experience.