The Art of Eating

Karolina Sotomayor
5 oct 2017
2 Min. de lectura

Please look carefully through the gallery of images before you read this...

You're right, they're all inside tubs, eating. What a strange place to have Chinese food, right? Or anything edible in general, unless you're into that, which is fine.

Did you ask yourself if these were photographs or paintings?

If you answered photographs it's understandable, we did too because Lee Price paints photorealistic images of women eating uncontrollably in private. We're not spying them, they're looking at themselves engaging in impulsive behaviors.

Price has always painted women, perhaps because she grew up in a household full of them. Her work generally revolves around women's relationship to food and compulsive behavior. She reflects that "most women [are] brought up to be givers. To nurture others at the expense of our own needs. We hide our appetites, not just for food but in many areas of our lives, and then consume in secret."

These paintings may speak to us on our own self-destructive behavior, things we are conscious of doing but that may seem our of our control. As viewers, we enter this intimate space, a space we have been in before. The paintings seem so real, we can almost hear the silence filled with their movements.

In a later series, Price works with a direct gaze, what she describes as "coming out of the closet" as the women in the portraits stare directly outward, they face us daringly and shamelessly as they indulge.

You can visit Lee Price's website to see more of her works here or visit Evoke Contemporary, where her next exhibition will take place on October 28, 2017.