Purse’s techniques echo works which are now part of the Western art canon, however his decontextualization of those limbs and body parts breaks free from what Marcel Duchamp famously called “retinal art”, offering a dynamic interaction between almost photorealistic representations and cultural symbolism.
Elliot Purse (B. 1989, Chicago) is an artist based in Brooklyn NY. He attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign before going on to receive an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. His work engages themes of masculinity, sports entertainment, and classicism in sharply rendered charcoal drawings and paintings.
[The series] started as a reflection on the representation of “strong men” in the American pop culture of Purse’s formative years, made of the theatrics of pro wrestling TV, bodybuilding magazines and comic books superheroes. In this new development, he is pushing further the examination of how malleable male bodies can be: they are hypertrophic, heavily modified but also deconstructed as parts and components and reassembled. These works are striking because through all the sampling, decomposition and recomposition, they manage to maintain a certain familiarity and gravitas through the use of classical techniques like charcoal rooted in the academic exercise of nude model drawing.
Purse’s techniques echo works which are now part of the Western art canon, however his decontextualization of those limbs and body parts breaks free from what Marcel Duchamp famously called “retinal art”, offering a dynamic interaction between almost photorealistic representations and cultural symbolism. Purse presents these images literally “detached” from their original reality, for viewers to reconcile with their own representations of masculinity and the shifting societal ones.