By Jackie Wullschlager
The Financial Times 21st July 2007
Among world-class female writers, woman as victim has always been a big theme: Jane Austen's Persuasion, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath. There is nothing comparable in painting, because for all sorts of social and economic reasons - chiefly the ease of writing in a room of one's own versus the hazards of male-run art schools and the expenses of setting up a studio - history has produced no great female artists and, indeed, few female artists at all. But now that is changing, and the rise of women painters, film-makers and sculptors is a significant feature of 21st-century culture. Sure enough, just as pioneering women writers had to exorcise the victim-demon as they appropriated traditional male literary genres, so a prime, inevitable topicin the visual arts today is woman as victim.
This is marked among the swathe of female artists at the current Venice Biennale, from Tracey Emin to Sophie Calle. It is also there in the violent images of the female body by hard hitters (and big sellers) Marlene Dumas and Jenny Savile, and it lurks behind the girly curlicues of fashionable painters such as Karen Kilimnik or Elizabeth Peyton. But queen of victim-artists is surely Stella Vine, whose first solo exhibition opened at Modern Art Oxford on Tuesday.
The 38-year-old Vine, who has hung this abundant, chaotic, uneven show of some 100 paintings herself, did not turn up as promised for the press view, but she did not need to. Drip by drip, her life story has seeped into a titillated press over the past few weeks: abused child, runaway teenager, single mum, stripper, actress; then, in 2004, a whiff of notoriety when Charles Saatchi bought her painting of a blotchy, scared, dead-eyed Princess Diana dressed up in a little-girl tiara beseeching her bodyguard, "Hi Paul can you come over I'm really frightened."
http://www.stellavine.com/reviews.htm
