Faculty of Art

Sculpture/Installation

Tatjana Reithofer

The Subduer is The Maja

The Subduer Is the Maja is a confrontational piece that seeks to question the reclining nude tradition in painting as well as the mistress archetype. I appropriate the Reclining Nude for myself as a symbol of female sexual empowerment yet there is a tension when contemplating that the reclining nude express ideals historically by men. So can it truly be a symbol of empowerment if those who created it were not women? This situates myself in an awkward balance of reconciling feminist views with arguably a problematic history of the depiction of women in art. Even if the foundations of these ideals are fragile and easily broken like the most delicate of ceramics, the maja (myself as the “pretty woman”), chooses to frame herself as a male fantasy, even at the expense of her own comfort and to be in the physical position of putting herself on display.