Post-Modernism (Visual Art)

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Art Essay Examine selected artworks by Yasumasa Morimura, Julie Rrap, Anne Zahalka and Cindy Sherman. How do these works challenge controversial ways in which gender has been depicted historically in the visual arts? Postmodern artists such as Julie Rrap and Cindy Sherman have presented works that expose and challenge the stereotypes of gender and gender roles that have dominated the historical representations of gender in the visual arts. Julie Rrap’s early 1980s installations, such as Break and Enter: The Nature of Femninity, and her versions of Edvard Munch’s paintings in Persona and Shadows, Rrap challenges the way in which the female identity has been presented in the history of gender representations. Likewise, through her Untitled Film Stills series and her later Sex Pictures, Cindy Sherman has used the nature of confronting images to examine our culture and its clichés, cleverly depicting the impact of representation. Postmodernism is the late 20th century concept of art that represents a departure from modernism. It literally means ‘after modernism’ and is a reaction against the narrowness modernism had developed in to. A distinguishing characteristic of the postmodernist movement is its wit and parody, and in particular the appropriation and pastiche of past artworks. Julie Rrap has used this device to investigate the ways that the female identity has been portrayed in history. She often appropriates or ‘steals’ male paintings of women as evident in her series Break and Enter: The Nature of Feminity and Persona and Shadows. Another characteristic is the use of contemporary culture as the subject matter. Cindy Sherman has demonstrated this through her works that shrewdly examines and challenges the ‘image’, exploring myriad constructions of female form in contemporary culture. It is through her extensive use of photography and mass media
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