Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. I don’t know what you think you know about contemporary art, but let me tell you something about Genieve Figgis. This Irish artist born in 1972 in Dublin and working in County Wicklow does not merely paint, she reinventions the way we look at our own history. Her acrylic canvases, where aristocratic characters seem to liquefy like ice cream left in the sun, are much more than simple reinterpretations of classical paintings.
When Figgis takes a Fragonard, a Boucher, or a Gainsborough and transforms it into a nightmarish and comedic version, she is not merely giving a nod to art history. No, she is blowing up the varnish of social conventions that defined these eras and which, let’s be honest, continue to define us today. Her aristocratic figures with melting faces, colors that drip and marbleize as if animated by a life of their own, tell a different story than the original paintings, one of a privileged class whose apparent solidity is merely an illusion.
Figgis’s success is itself a fascinating story. Unlike the traditional path of artists, she first started a family before pursuing her art studies. ‘Getting married was an escape. The only door to freedom that I could find,’ she confided [1]. This statement speaks volumes about the social constraints she had to face growing up in 1970s Ireland under the dominant influence of the Catholic Church. It was only at the age of thirty that she enrolled in the art school of Gorey in County Wexford, painting while her children were at school. She later earned a higher diploma from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.
But what truly propelled her career was her use of social media, particularly Twitter, where she shared her work. In 2013, the American artist Richard Prince sent her a message asking if he could buy one of her pieces. This simple exchange led to major exhibitions for Figgis, completely reversing the traditional path of artistic legitimation. ‘At first, I was posting online because I wanted to reach out and share with the world what I was doing. I wanted to connect with other people, and I didn’t need any permission. I felt free to share what I was doing,’ she explains [2]. This unconventional approach is emblematic of her entire artistic practice.
What immediately strikes in Figgis’s works is their unsettling visual quality. Her acrylic paintings are created with a technique that involves a lot of water, making the contours blurry and fluid. ‘I like them to be extended and free to move in an animated way like in a film,’ she says about her figures [3]. This technique allows for a dreamlike and slightly nightmarish quality that transforms scenes of aristocratic opulence into grotesque and comedic visions.
Take, for example, her reinterpretation of Fragonard’s ‘The Swing.’ In the original, a young woman in a sumptuous dress joyfully swings in a lush garden, while a hidden admirer looks under her skirt. In Figgis’s version, the scene takes a macabre turn: the elegantly dressed woman seems to be a skeleton, and the environment appears to dissolve around her. Critic Roberta Smith noted that ‘in a brightly toned version of Fragonard’s ‘The Swing,’ the sumptuously dressed lady seems to be a skeleton. She could also be underwater’ [4].
This transformation is not merely a formal exercise. It reveals the fragility of the social structures that these classical paintings sought to glorify. The functional and perfect bodies of the aristocrats, symbols of their power and legitimacy, literally decompose, revealing the spectacle of high society as a fragile and temporary masquerade.
Figgis’s work fits into a tradition of social critique through art that dates back to Goya, whose ‘Caprichos’ and ‘Disasters of War’ also used grotesque figures to denounce the follies of his time. But where Goya was overtly political, Figgis operates with a more playful subtlety. Her approach could be compared to that of the medieval carnival, as theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin, where the inversion of social hierarchies allowed for a temporary but powerful critique of established power.
In her paintings like ‘Orange family room’ or ‘Couple in lockdown,’ Figgis presents aristocratic family scenes where the bodies seem to dissolve and merge with each other, creating an impression of decomposition. The faces, in particular, undergo a remarkable transformation, with bulging eyes, mouths twisted into grotesque grimaces, features that drip like melting wax. These deformed faces recall carnival masks, which temporarily allowed for the transcendence of social hierarchies. By deforming the figures of the aristocracy in this way, Figgis literally unmasks their pretension to natural superiority.
Figgis’s painting technique plays a major role in this deconstruction. By using acrylic diluted with a lot of water, she leaves a large part to chance and the unexpected in the creative process. ‘I like the somewhat unreliable nature of the material. The event of chance. The element of surprise in painting,’ she says [5]. This approach is profoundly democratic, refusing the total mastery that traditional academic art valued so much, and which was often in the service of the powerful.
Figgis’s use of color is particularly interesting. Her vibrant and sometimes candy-colored palettes contrast with the darker and more majestic tones of the classical paintings she reinterprets. This color choice contributes to the carnivalesque aspect of her work but also to its critical dimension. The cotton candy pinks, electric blues, and acidic yellows transform the supposed grandeur of the aristocracy into a kitsch and decorative farce.
Figgis’s interest in the representation of the aristocracy is not trivial. ‘The royals and aristocrats in my painting are like everyone else. They just have much better costumes and work a little harder in their environment,’ she explains [6]. This seemingly simple observation contains an incisive critique of power structures. By reducing the aristocracy to their costumes and social performance, Figgis reveals the constructed and artificial nature of social hierarchy.
Figgis’s practice can be seen as a form of carnivalization of art history, where cultural icons of the past are reinvented with a mix of irreverence and tenderness. Her paintings are not mere parodies; they are visual meditations on how power stages itself through art.
Cinema constitutes another major source of inspiration for Figgis. ‘I love cinema and cinematography, costumes, color, and atmosphere,’ she acknowledges [7]. The vignettes of her works could easily be taken from period films like ‘The Wings of the Dove’ (1997) with Helena Bonham Carter. Her painting ‘Family with a Boat’ evokes the WASP wealth immortalized in ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ while ‘Nude on a Bed’ echoes a scene from Walerian Borowczyk’s film ‘La Bete’ (1975).
This reference to cinema is not coincidental. The cinematic medium, with its possibilities of editing and time manipulation, shares with Figgis’s painting a capacity to reinvent the real. But where cinema creates the illusion of movement through a succession of still images, Figgis captures movement within the still image itself, through the fluidity of her painting.
‘When we watch a film, what we love is seen for only a brief moment, then it’s gone, but I try to capture something in the medium of painting that allows for a more lasting feeling,’ she explains [8]. This statement reveals a fundamental aspect of her practice: the desire to prolong the ephemeral, to give permanence to what is inherently transitory.
This temporal preoccupation is also reflected in her choice of historical subjects. By reinterpreting paintings from the 18th century, Figgis establishes a dialogue between different temporalities: the aristocratic past represented in the original paintings, the present of her own artistic intervention, and an implicit future where current social hierarchies might seem as fragile and absurd as those of the past.
The cinematic dimension of her work is also perceptible in her way of conceiving her characters. ‘I place the characters in the work and dress them to play a role. They sometimes move and animate like in a film,’ she says [9]. This vision of painted figures as actors in a performance echoes the sociological theory of Erving Goffman, who conceived social life as a series of performances where individuals ‘play’ different roles according to contexts.
In this perspective, the aristocrats and royal figures that Figgis paints are not merely privileged individuals but actors in an elaborate social spectacle. Their sumptuous costumes and studied poses are theatrical props, and the deformation that Figgis subjects them to reveals the artificiality of their performance.
What is particularly interesting in Figgis’s work is how it resists a simplistic political reading. Although her paintings can be interpreted as a critique of the aristocracy and social hierarchies, they are not explicitly revolutionary. As critic Billy Anania noted, Figgis seems ‘more comfortable operating within existing political hierarchies’ [10].
This ambiguity is perhaps what makes her work so relevant in our current era, where traditional power structures are being questioned but persist nonetheless. Figgis’s aristocratic figures, with their disintegrating faces and bodies merging with their environment, embody this tension between persistence and dissolution.
Figgis’s works are not merely comments on the past; they are reflections on our present. In a world where social inequalities continue to grow and where contemporary economic elites rival the aristocracies of the past in terms of wealth and power, her paintings remind us of the fragility and absurdity of social hierarchies.
A particularly striking aspect of Figgis’s work is her representation of women. In the history of Western art, women have often been represented as passive objects of the male gaze. In the rococo paintings that Figgis reinterprets, women are frequently shown in seductive poses, intended to please a presumed male viewer.
Figgis subverts this tradition by giving her female figures a grotesque autonomy. Their deformation is not a diminution of their power but rather a liberation from the constraints of idealized beauty. ‘Retraveling certain rococo paintings was a way to give a voice and a scene to women to be seen as free and opulent and less restricted and confined in the history and idealization of the past female body,’ she explains [11].
This feminist approach is particularly visible in her reinterpretations of Manet’s ‘Olympia.’ In the original, already controversial in its time for its crude realism and direct gaze, a naked prostitute looks directly at the viewer. In Figgis’s version, the figure becomes even more disturbing, her body deforming and liquefying while maintaining that direct gaze. This transformation amplifies the subversive dimension of the original, even more radically defying the conventions of female representation.
Figgis’s Catholic upbringing in Ireland also plays an important role in her artistic vision. ‘My experience growing up in Ireland in the 1970s gave the impression that the Catholic Church had a lot of power and influence over all aspects of our lives,’ she recounts [12]. This religious influence manifests in her work through a certain sense of the macabre and a preoccupation with transcendence.
The ghostly figures that populate her paintings evoke the many references to spirits and saints in Catholic iconography. ‘The horror of Jesus on the cross that we were all forced to look at, the martyrdom and sacrifice of the priests and nuns, and the cult of the heroes of the evangelists and popes all fell into my imagination,’ she confides [13].
This spiritual dimension of her work is particularly striking in her group scenes, where the figures often seem to float in an indeterminate space, like souls awaiting the Last Judgment. ‘There are many characters who are suspended on clouds, floating in the void of uncertainty. Sometimes, you notice similarities in my work where the figures are suspended but seem quite joyful and comfortably reveal their own performance on stage. A kind of rebellion in a way,’ she explains [14]. This rebellion against religious authority is also reflected in her approach to painting itself. By prioritizing experimentation and unpredictability over the rigorous technical control that academic art valued, Figgis defies traditional notions of mastery and authority.
What makes Genieve Figgis’s work so powerful is its ability to be both accessible and complex, humorous and profound. Her paintings first draw us in with their striking visual quality and grotesque humor but hold us with their multiple layers of meaning and subtle commentary on power, history, and representation.
In a contemporary art world often dominated by conceptual abstraction or austere minimalism, Figgis dares to be excessive, theatrical, and emotional. She embraces the materiality of painting, its ability to drip, to blend, to surprise, and uses these physical qualities to create images that resonate emotionally with viewers.
Her commercial and critical success attests to the power of this approach. In a New York Times article, critic Roberta Smith compared Figgis to ‘Goya, Karen Kilimnik, and George Condo’ [15], thus placing her in a lineage of artists who use deformation and the grotesque to reveal social and psychological truths.
What truly sets Figgis apart, however, is the evident joy she takes in the act of painting. ‘Painting is about pleasure. If it wasn’t enjoyable, I wouldn’t do it,’ she simply states [16]. This celebration of creative pleasure, combined with incisive social critique, makes her work a unique and valuable contribution to contemporary art.
By reinventing the pictorial traditions of the past with a mix of irreverence and respect, Figgis invites us to reconsider not only art history but also the social structures that this art has often served to legitimize. Her melting aristocrats, grotesque queens, and deformed party scenes remind us that even the most seemingly solid social hierarchies can be revealed as fluid and malleable as paint itself.
- Figgis, G., Interview in ‘Genieve Figgis: Drama Party’, M WOODS 798, 2023.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Smith, R., ‘Genieve Figgis: Good Morning, Midnight’, The New York Times, October 23, 2014.
- Figgis, G., cited in ‘Genieve Figgis in Venice and Antwerp: the aristocracy revisited’, Numero, November 11, 2024.
- Figgis, G., Interview in ‘Genieve Figgis: Drama Party’, op. cit.
- Figgis, G., cited in ‘For Artist Genieve Figgis, Beauty is Rebellion’, Artnet News, 2023.
- Ibid.
- Figgis, G., Interview in ‘Genieve Figgis: Drama Party’, op. cit.
- Anania, B., ‘Genieve Figgis Paints High Society as a Spectacle of Humor and Horror’, Hyperallergic, November 21, 2021.
- Figgis, G., cited in ‘For Artist Genieve Figgis, Beauty is Rebellion’, op. cit.
- Figgis, G., cited in ‘Genieve Figgis in Venice and Antwerp: the aristocracy revisited’, op. cit.
- Ibid.
- Figgis, G., Interview in ‘Genieve Figgis: Drama Party’, op. cit.
- Smith, R., ‘Genieve Figgis: Good Morning, Midnight’, op. cit.
- Figgis, G., cited in ‘Genieve Figgis in Venice and Antwerp: the aristocracy revisited’, op. cit.
