Sadie Lee Shocking Blue: Paintings of Sandy Powell and Other Stories.

For her first solo show at New Art Projects British Painter Sadie Lee has take the title from Shocking Blue, a Dutch-based Rock / Pop band from the late 60’s/early 70’s whose biggest hit was Venus. In this show Lee looks at gender through this lens and finds a contemporary vision of Venus that explores both gender and identity. Lee has made six new portraits of Academy Award winning costume designer Sandy Powell. The paintings are displayed in pairs, representing the front and back of the same pose, which mirror the style of costume designs. The reverse pose suggests the pictorial trope of the ‘Rückenfigur’, particularly the Caspar David Friedrich painting ‘Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog’, which this pose closely resembles. Sadie Lee is aware of these poses resembling old-fashioned paper dress dolls where you can change the outfits with fold-over tabs. As a result here the costume designer becomes the vehicle for costume itself and a metaphor for change and transformation. The pose that Sandy Powell adopts is the classic stance of three quarter profile with hand on hip, similar to the promotional image of Tilda Swinton in Sally Potter’s Orlando, which she designed the costumes for. As a collection of works, the artist refers to the completed series as ‘Sadie Does Sandy’. Also on display is a mannequin dressed in Sandy Powell’s shirt, tie and suit, which feature in the paintings. Sandy Powell wears blue, and blue mostly refers to the suit that Sandy is wearing (and not wearing) in the portraits. Her suit is an exact copy of the Freddie Buretti satin suit that Bowie wore in the video for Life On Mars and Powell’s hair is dyed a similar shade of orange to Bowie’s, underlining her connection to Bowie’s style from this era. Bowie’s / Powell’s suits also reference the blue satin of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy.