Olivié Keck: Drop Dead Gorgeous project 2019
Drop Dead Gorgeous, 2019
About project
Society’s love affair with ‘crimes of passion’ as entertainment is at an all-time high and has recently been acknowledged as the most watched genre of escapism in the media, mainly by women. With this series of paintings, Keck seeks to treat each of her works as staged crime scenes complete with all the makings of a grand cinematic moment. The lifeless subjects are adorned with rich, colourful garments in luxurious surroundings, all aesthetic embellishments intended to distract from the deathly tragic circumstance. The works embody a playful parody rooted in a more serious questioning of our cultural obsession with depictions of violence and the romanticism of crime as entertainment.
Stairway to Heaven, 2019/Beautiful People with Beautiful Problems, 2019/Death becomes you, 2019
About artist
Olivié Keck (b.1989, Cape Town) received a BAFA from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in 2011. She currently lives and works in Cape Town.
“I’m a bit of creative juggler. I like using a variety of mediums (drawing, printmaking and ceramics) to estrange people from the ‘commonplace’ narratives that my subjects portray, to keep the viewer looking with delighted eyes. I relish loud colours, juxtaposing ideas, jumbled associations and subverting expectations. There’s a ‘pleasure spiked with pain’ feeling about most of the work I make. This is a sensation I feel captures my experience of the world. Humans are never fully in one attitude; and I’d like to think my work echoes both the severity and the humor in this sentiment.”