Ferrer Pizarro, Selimbašić, Zabinski

The exhibition brings together the paintings of a heterogeneous group of three female artists: Berlin-based Ximena Ferrer Pizarro (Peru, 1994), Adelisa Selimbašić (Italy–Bosnia, 1996), living in New York, and Scout Zabinski (USA, 1997), from New Jersey based in Los Angeles. Hailing from different territories and human landscapes, these artists share the critical sharpness of their generations, with awareness and self-reassurance. Their profoundly different visual compositions reflect the contemporary Western/westernized world according to their subjectivities and personal and social experiences from clubbing, retreating, or immigrating, among many others.
The issue of immigration and cultural clashes appears especially in the work of Ximena Ferrer Pizarro. Her paintings resemble caricatured cartoon figures in well-humoured, boisterous, and kitsch situations full of social critique. As a Latina girl who came to study art in Europe, her works comment on her own migration experiences and the perception of how the coloniser's gaze created a legacy of frustration and self-devaluation of that presumed "other." The craving for a slim body and blonde hair, far from the common Latin American phenotype, is one of the themes the artist paints with strong colors and non-naturalistic strokes, infused with sarcasm and irony. Her paintings depict pop culture and the life of working people who learned to survive abuse of power and exploitation, while also celebrating a life full of music and, of course, drama. Ximena conveys the vitality of the global South, asserting herself to fit and overflow the rigid, sometimes suffocating, protocols of the North.
Adelisa Selimbašić's paintings, on the other hand, depict faceless bodies in very intimate crops, evoking a much less noisy atmosphere. Her human figures of undefined ages and sometimes ambiguous gender are created in soft colors in such proximity that the figurative can border on abstraction. For her, it is important how people perceive themselves through the pierced or tattooed depicted bodies, whether naked or with little casual clothing, in relaxed postures. In general, her models are friends, people she meets in brief encounters, or even pictures found on the internet and portrayed with permission. Her compositions in the photographic format recall social media platforms, and create a false intimate atmosphere, letting evident a generational perspective. She explores her subjects through a detached gaze that examines and paints the body-object in detail but keeps a secure distance. Yet, although it is possible to perceive eroticism, celebration, and lust in quiet scenes, there is also a vibrational silence behind them. Adelisa does not resort mainly to self-representation, and the themes of her paintings convey fantasy and desire without judgments.
At last, Scout Zabinski presents a seemingly self-referential group of works in which her naked image is central. However, the artist does not allow us to truly know herself, neither as subject nor as her double. While it may appear to be a narcissistic exercise, her art goes beyond commonplaces of biographical proposals. Scout is a self-taught artist and wants her art to be about the collective experience and whatever emotion it gives other people: “I needed a figure to paint, and so I painted myself. Every woman struggles at some point with connecting their spirit to their body and how that affects your self-image and work, but that really isn't what my work is about. I just think the female figure is one of the most beautiful things in the world. The female body is its own archetype.”¹ She draws inspiration from Western art history, studies in philosophy, postcolonial feminism, literature, and others. Through her paintings, she restates artistic operations and genres like ready-mades, still-life, and portraits. She poses for her own works to be “as vulnerable and raw as possible,” letting the viewer feel slightly uncomfortable with such intimacy. Her view on making art is committed and frank: “I guess I paint because I want to grow. Art saved me from dying as a teen. My identity is so largely consumed by what I create that I don’t know where or what I would be without it. It’s become this strange immortalization process that both intrigues and terrifies me.”
Far from presenting similar works, these artists are like chroniclers of their time and social context. Their scenes reflect pride and skepticism on issues that are valuable to contemporary women, such as autonomy, affirmative life choices, gender equality, self-care, trauma healing, and more. The paintings in this exhibition embrace the beauty of any body, and some apparently harmonious compositions are indeed the results of disturbing perceptions of the world.
Without necessarily belonging to a specific ideological or political movement in the arts, they offer politicized views, aware of the decline of patriarchy as we know it, that point to the end of an era. Thus, these artists present and represent the body and eroticism, social pattern questioning, and even rage, without fear of the humiliations that have historically judged less conventional female acts. Their portrayed figures and situations proudly express their own rules as emancipated women, whether in the real world or in the fictive world of art.

Text by Daniela Labra