The Power of Wendy Kveck’s Mediated Portraits

by Phillip Barcio

There’s food in Wendy Kveck’s portraits of women—but it’s the women who are being consumed. Consumed by the viewer’s gaze; consumed by time; consumed by judgment and expectations; consumed by a culture ravenous for the souls of the vulnerable.

The women Kveck paints have the look and feel of people melting, succumbing to physical and metaphysical gravity. Kveck’s gloopy, painterly brushstrokes, radioactive color palette, and frenetic scrawled lines conjure depictions of femininity rarely represented in fine art—women confidently, powerfully coming undone.

(Left) Wendy Kveck, Consciousness Raising, 2021. Oil, paint pen on canvas on panel 54 x 40 inches. © Wendy Kveck. Photo by Sampsel Preston.  (Right) Wounder Woman, 2018. Oil, paint pen on canvas on panel 54 x 40inches.
© Wendy Kveck. Photo by Sampsel Preston.

“I’m thinking about states of vulnerability and exhaustion, feeling out of control by design or through the circumstances of one’s life,” Kveck says. “Against the backdrops of this current moment when feminists are fighting for bodily autonomy and social justice and an art historical canon in which women were depicted predominantly by male painters working in the Western European tradition, I’m interested in artists having agency to revisit specific art historical and contemporary tropes and insert their own lived experiences through a feminist lens.”

Kveck’s portraits begin with performance. She doesn’t use her own body; she enlists other women who are interested in having these conversations, in subverting female representations from the media and art history and invites them to collaborate with her in a private, intimate space. The women cover their faces with foodstuff like frosting or meat and then reenact or re-pose images from the internet, art history, or children’s coloring books—images that relate to different female cliches such as the princess, the martyr, the party girl, the pageant queen, or other characters that Kveck and the women cocreate. The food masks start off fresh and beautiful, then quickly become messy as they begin disassembling.

“There is a relationship to aging, to evolving or devolving, and the impact of the environment on our bodies and psyches,” Kveck says. “I think about these as messy interiorities spilling out, in over-the-top form.”

Kveck photographs the performances, then creates sketches from that documentation through a technique known as blind contour drawing, in which an artist draws a subject using a single, unbroken line without ever looking at the paper, with the goal of learning to look more closely at your subject. Pulling from these drawings, as well as from other found images and the performance photographs, she develops an exquisite corpse of sorts, then paints that amalgam on canvas with impasto oil paints—a visceral, medium-specific call and response with the performer’s liquescent culinary veil.

Kveck’s portraits are defined by their excesses. They undermine something simplistic by using a messy approach. They’re unlike what people are used to looking at, which, by definition, means they expand the visual literacy of viewers.

“Images shape perception,” Kveck says. “People are shaped, communities are shaped, culture is shaped by language and the language of images.”

Kveck has experienced the negative consequences of image consumption firsthand.

“I just stopped looking at fashion magazines in my 20s,” Kveck says. “I definitely consider what it means to put more images out in the world, as painted objects. I don’t really want my portraits to have a fixed meaning or message or even interpretation. They’re not traditional presentations of beauty in my mind. It’s more about asking questions about our relationship to images, and subverting certain kinds of representations of women, or even the idea of representing women.”

Kveck was raised in a traditional middle-class Catholic household in the suburbs of Chicago. Both visually, and in terms of what roles were modeled for women, the suburban landscape was, she describes, “very homogenous.” When she went away to study art at the University of Iowa, she was immersed in a community of visual artists, writers, musicians, and performers that fostered a diversity of new ideas.

That’s where Kveck first became aware of feminist art. Cuban American performance artist Ana Mendieta is among the University of Iowa’s many influential alumni. For her Rape Scene performance in 1973, Mendieta challenged community indifference towards campus sexual violence by inviting fellow students to her apartment, where they found her half naked, bent over a table, and covered in blood.

Kveck also studied the work of Adrian Piper, Hannah Wilke, and Faith Ringgold, along with the writing and curation of Lucy Lippard. Her collaborative portraiture process continues the feminist legacy these luminaries helped establish—of mobilizing the female body as both the object and the subject of the work.

“I pull from Feminism, the value of community, of being in dialogue with other women, and the idea of consciousness raising in conversations we have before and during the sessions,” Kveck says.

Like her feminist forebearers, Kveck is creating aesthetic phenomena that have the power to transmit cultural signifiers that can undermine codified attitudes and behaviors.

She thinks about how the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood represented female bodies—what those representations say about that time in history, and what they continue to assert about gender roles today. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the founder of that aptly named brotherhood, is still revered within contemporary institutions for his depictions of such tropes as the fallen woman (Persephone); the sinless, perfect mother (Virgin Mary); women as objects of men’s sexual desire (Bocca Baciata); and women as fertile, nurturing, docile creatures (Monna Primavera).

What values do we endorse when we celebrate depictions of women borrowed from pagan myths and ancient religious texts that served mostly to maintain systems of social hierarchy and control?

Kveck highlights another dehumanizing representation of women from art history that continues to resonate through visual culture today: that of women as hysterical and sinful, a trope embodied by the Expressionist painter Chaïm Soutine in his painting Mad Woman. Kveck borrowed Soutine’s title for a portrait in a series she made based on found paparazzi images of drunken celebrities. Such depictions of feminine vulnerability play into toxic masculine fantasies of the foolish, helpless victim in need of a hero; they conspire with puritanical value systems to pressure women to be whole, and then exploit them when they fall short.

“I’m interested in how those images are circulated and consumed in the media as a way of capitalizing on women’s real struggles with substance abuse, mental health, extremely personal challenges commodified for the public,” Kveck says. “How do our encounters with images shape our perceptions of ourselves and others, and our relationships?”

Kveck’s portraiture practice wrestles with these questions, unraveling obsolete visual legacies so something constructive can come into being. Her portraits and the women who perform for them are helping to manifest a new paradigm that reframes vulnerability as confidence; that mobilizes indulgence as a creative force; that reveals exhaustion as a space of potential; and that exalts the strange beauty of coming undone.

“That’s the power of art,” Kveck says. “It can reflect or reimagine in ways that make us question what we’ve seen before.”

filmmaker, public speaker, social media skeptic, degrowth proponent, animal protector, maker of antiracist choices, and member of the executive team at Kavi Gupta in Chicago. You can read his writing and stare into his steely eyes at philbarcio.com.