Ines Kouidis - Canvas Prints

Ines Kouidis' collages are a sight to behold; cut-out, scrapbook hysteria, tautly expressed with a masterly skill. The artist's pop culture iconography finds agency through her fascination with matters of fame and fashion. Every single one of her portraits is a rollercoaster ride through the entangled webs of the media, the viewing public, and the artist's keen eye. Taking her raw material from vintage magazines, film posters, and publicity prints, Kouidis' aesthetic is an elegant mish-mash of spent hopes, fulfilled dreams, and yesterday's news. An artisan in the strictest sense of the word, Kouidis allows her work to pay witness to the deconstructive process of fame and celebrity culture. The fragility of the human body is often emphasized, as the artist explores the slightest movements of dancers, athletes, and swimmers, and reflects the resonance of these snatched glimpses.

Without doubt Ines Kouidis has been passed the baton by the mother of collage-art, Hannah Höch, whose place in the Dada movement of the early twentieth century has infused pop culture with a long-lasting love of the cut-up. Like Höch, the artist demonstrates a sense of lightness in her work, synonymous with the initial aims of the Cubist movement to capture multiple viewpoints of a single subject. With a sophisticated sense of style, contrasting colors, and juxtaposed surfaces, Kouidis' celebration and deconstruction of our cultural fascination with the cult of celebrity is expressed with an acute eye for detail. While the media may shape the limits of our desires, it is the artist's job to pick apart these social constructs and display the elemental make up of such a pervasive public pleasure.