British artist Stella Vine was born in Alnwick, Northumberland, 1969.
Exhibitions:
Saatchi Gallery, Roberts & Tilton, Modern Art Oxford, Transition Gallery, Hamiltons Gallery, Cornell University, Riflemaker, Indiana University Museum, Maddox Gallery, MIMA, Cecil Sharp House, Kingsgate Project Space, Lido Projects, Alan Segev Gallery, Kent University, Subliminal Projects, Jeffrey Charles Gallery, This Way Up Gallery, Dragon Bar, Bailiffgate Museum, The Fridge, The Discerning Eye, Cob Gallery, and Blacks.
Collected by:
The Sidney & Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Bailiffgate Museum, Discerning Eye Collection, Brandes Family Collection, Goss Michael Foundation, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Kent University, Norwich Castle Museum, David Roberts Collection, and Charles Saatchi.
Publications:
‘Stella Vine - Paintings’
Designed by Fuel, edited by Andrew Nairne, with an essay by Germaine Greer.
Published by Modern Art Oxford, 2007.
ISBN:
Press:
“The quality that critics use to undermine the credibility of Vine’s art - that it is adolescent - is actually the source of its indisputable emotional impact. Without question her art is adolescent - in the same way that Holden Caulfield’s observations about a world filled with phonics, and Kurt Cobain’s acid outrage over adult lies and injustice, and Sylvia Plath’s over heated anger and bitterness at the world’s betrayals were adolescent. At first Vine’s art appears clumsy, but look longer and it its less careless than bitterly honest.”
Anna Finel Honigman – The Saatchi Gallery
“She paints like a frog and should not give up the night job”
Brian Sewell - Evening Standard
“There’s a vitality and truth in her work that can’t be faked”
Richard Dorment – The Telegraph
“Though Stella Vine remains viscerally connected to the facts of her life, she is not her own hero. Her art is not a performance.”
Germaine Greer - Modern Art Oxford
“I think she will come to be known as one of the most important artists of our time.”
Andrew Nairne – Modern Art Oxford
“Look at her Kate Moss, for instance. The spaces between her cutely imperfect teeth are crammed with darkness. Her smile is as taut as a sneer. The babydoll palette of Vine’s pictures turns acid. The colours are souring. The mascara runs with tears. The dreams are curdling into the ghastly self-confessional parodies of the reality. The highly polished Vogue aesthetic is turning into the trashy Heat snap. We can’t dismiss these paintings as a mere racket – not in a world in which the racket has become the real thing.”
Rachel Campbell-Johnston – The Times
“Jean Harlowe lounges on top of an orange tiger skin rug across a sea of electric blue paint, her face a carnival mask with sharp teeth, blood-red lips and clumpy mascara guarding her startled blue eyes like barbed wire. These and other grotesqueries find their mirror in the tiger’s blue glass orbs, exaggeratedly arched eyebrows and hastily rendered fur. The painting has nothing at all to do with Jean Harlowe and everything to do with Vine’s apparent aversion to either mixing colors on the palette, or leaving any paint in the tube. Her affection for celebrities, combined with the brazenly unacademic ambitions of her figurative style, triggers comparison to her contemporary Elizabeth Peyton. Vine is far less sophisticated, but that is precisely the point. The artlessness Peyton strives for as a conceptual frame work, Vine achieves without even trying, and her emerging voice does not seek to overcome her outsider status. Rather, her research is really appealing due to the awkward and utterly unselfconscious enthusiasm with which she proceeds.”
Shana Nys Dambrot - Tema Celeste
“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 topic in 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.”
Jackie Wullschlager – The Financial Times
“I think she’s the real deal”
Lynn Barber – The Observer
”Stella Vine is direct and honest, rather like her paintings.”
Simon Kelner – GQ
To follow…
Waldemar Januszczac – The Sunday Times