Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> It was in New York City that the socio-political as well as aesthetic concerns behind Afruz Amighi’s latest works were brought to the fore. The city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is home to Cabanel’s wailing Echo of 1874 as well as classical Greco-Roman sculpture and most compelling to Amighi an extensive collection of African and Oceanic statues and masks. Women are presented throughout with a mixture of emotional intensity and physical elegance. From marble Athenian goddesses to the helmet masks of the Mende and Sherbro peoples of Sierra Leone female fortitude is an emblematic presence that can conjure love healing knowledge and strength. The beauties that bestow this however are of course idealised visions of womanhood; kind of eye but also pert of breast. This is the double-edged sword of personifications of female power. Even though Echo the doomed mountain nymph of Greek mythology speaks forever she is doomed to repeat the last three words spoken to her by another. Similarly Amighi’s twisting sketches and sculptures from Knife Girl to Amazon represent an aspirational archetype: a powerful presence but one that is idealised detached and unreachable. (LL)