Pornamental Tableware by nina levett from austria

“Fuck me” “Lick me”, “Breath”, “Work”: sentences like dots, painted over the flowers of a traditional old porcelain. Streams of sperm on wall panels, embroidery/embracery, perfucktion, sexperiment.

The Austrian artist and designer Nina Levett has used the image of the woman - or more precisely housewife and mother, simultaneously desexualised and abused - as the theme for her work.

The viewer can follw a real-time documentation of the destruction of expectations, roll and gender positions. I want to portray the image of a housewife, that has gone astray in the exclusion of her early marriage, who has vainlessly tried to act against this vicious mistake.

Her pornamental works embrace illusions of sexuality, eroticism as a try to „break out“ but also as an eternal imprisonment. The ornament is used as a controversial means to hide but also subverge from power structures. This work is embedded in an artistic environment, that has won general interest in the last years.

Parastou Frouhar, Shirin Neshat, Sarah Morris, Sakshi Gupta, Raqib Shaw, Hema Upadhyay, Philip Taaffe and other artists can be named in this context. The difference of these artists to Levett are, that Levett codes her works as design and in this way brings them back into the context from where they try to escape.

The variations of ths „locked in“ existence are small: fridge door open, fridge door closed, set the table, clean the table, open the dish washer, turn on the dishwasher, turn off the dishwasher.

The material of this artistic non-adaption is taken fom the private spaces and goes back into these private spaces but encoded with her graphics contextualised as design work.