Aaron Butt : Kate as Queen Nefertiti

Kate as Queen Nefertiti!

18 Nov – 19 Dec 2015!

Kate as Queen Nefetiti

“Modern and contemporary art could be exhibited alongside pre-modern artefacts” (Fraser 2007, 214).

Kate as Queen Nefertiti is a series of thirteen paintings that combine photographs of my wife Kate with photographs of Queen Nefertiti busts. Influenced by my excursion to the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania as well as Kate and I’s recent marriage, the paintings depict Kate’s face overlayed onto Nefertiti’s, resulting in hybrids that resemble both subjects though neither entirely.

The busts are presented in various states of decay; some are chipped and fractured, their faces evidence of their approximately three thousand year history. Some busts are depicted mounted on museum display devices while others float in neutral coloured space. In all of the paintings, Kate’s eyes are empty, resembling a blind person or extraterrestrial being. Kate is depicted with a slight smile and the authoritative posture of Egyptian royalty.

The combination of pre-modern artefacts, modern art and contemporary art at MONA had a significant influence on Kate as Queen Nefertiti. The disregard of geographical, cultural, historical and conceptual differences between works (as suggested in MONA’s first brief above) effectively undermines straightforward constructions of binaries. In MONA, ugliness and beauty, ancient and contemporary, life and death, strangeness and familiarity, digital and the handmade become adjacent rather than polarised, generating unexpected connections between distant works in the history of art, particularly an intercultural obsession with sex and death.

At the National Gallery of Victoria I unexpectedly encountered the Queen Nefertiti bust in the collection that Kate as Queen Nefertiti 4 is based on. To my surprise, the bust looked far different from the painting, despite modelling it as accurately from the form as possible. What I had previously neglected was the number of levels of mediation; that what I had created was a painting of a photograph of a sculpture of Queen Nefertiti. With each representation, Nefertiti’s appearance changed, and yet, as Kate’s face was overlayed onto Nefertiti’s, key features appeared uncannily similar. The Kate as Queen Nefertiti series was not concerned with busts, or with painting, but with the photographic moment. The photographs of the busts, the photographs of Kate and the paintings of Kate are all merely snapshots, which in time will become fascinating, grotesque ruins. “(T)he ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endues.

How old is this world! I walk between two eternities” (Diderot 1767, 198).

Diderot, Denis. 1767. “Le Salon de 1767” in Diderot on Art II: The Salon of 1967, edited by John Goodman, 198. London and New Haven: Yale University Press.

Fraser, Mark. 2007. “MONA BRIEF #01” in The Making Of MONA, edited by Adrian Franklin, 214. Melbourne: Penguin Group.

Aaron But October 2015

Kate as Queen Nefertiti 9, 2015 oil on canvas 30 x 40 cm $700

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Kate as Queen Nefertiti 4, 2015 oil on canvas 50 x 60 cm $1,000

Kate as Queen Nefertiti 6,, 2015 oil on canvas 45 x 45 cm $900 Â

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Kate as Queen Nefertiti 5, 2015 oil on canvas 45 x 45 cm $900

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Kate as Queen Nefertiti 2, 2015 oil on canvas 60 x 60 cm $1,300

Kate as Queen Nefertiti 1, 2015 oil on canvas 60 x 90 cm $1,500

Kate as Queen Nefertiti 3, 2015 oil on canvas 50 x 60 cm $1,000

Kate as Queen Nefertiti 8, 2015 oil on canvas 30 x 40 cm $700

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Kate as Queen Nefertiti 7, 2015 oil on canvas 40 x 50 cm $800

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Kate as Queen Nefertiti 13, 2015 oil on canvas 20 x 20 cm $400

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Kate as Queen Nefertiti 10, 2015 oil on canvas 25 x 30 cm $600

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Kate as Queen Nefertiti 12, 2015 oil on canvas 20 x 25 cm $500

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Kate as Queen Nefertiti 11, 2015 oil on canvas 20 x 25 cm $500

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