Artist Biography
eX de Medici was born in 1959 in the Riverina district of New South Wales. Her broad practice incorporates performance and installation art, tattooing, photography, painting and drawing. De Medici's fastidiously executed drawings and watercolours reflect an interest in natural-history watercolour illustration and relate to her practice as a tattooist. Concerned with power and its representation, de Medici brings a contemporary perspective to the vanitas tradition. Recurring motifs in her thought-provoking works include skulls, guns and the historically loaded symbol of the swastika. eX de Medici has exhibited extensively in Australia and her work is represented in major collections. Recent solo exhibitions include eX de Medici@MPRG, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, 2004; and Soft Steel, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2003. eX de Medici is represented by Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney. She lives and works in Canberra.
Works
♂ Gun(n)s 'n Styx 2005
Porno image 2005
Take # 5 2005
Take # 6 2005
Glock 2005
Artist Statement
The work is part of a continuum of a strategy employed since 1996, and has its roots in the backward-looking strategies which saw the return of Volkskunst (art of the people) a politically proscribed movement in Germany in the mid 1930s. My strategy was to produce the most conservative objects I could think of. The objects had to be instantly recognisable, visually seductive, skilful, accessible, reactionary and psychologically nauseating. The objects track the emergence and unfolding of new, improved method in an old way of thinking.
