Genieve Figgis

b. 1972

Irish artist Genieve Figgis produces small-to mid-scale acrylic and oil paintings rich in color and texture. She paints portraits, landscapes, and still lifes – the trademarks of traditional painting. Yet the figures in her portraits appear ghostly because of the atmospheric brushstrokes she uses. Her people are either faceless or ghoul-like creatures, whose forms merge with their semi-abstract backgrounds. The effect is a sinister vision tinged with humor.

Figgis lives and works in County Wicklow, Ireland. A mother of two children, she went back to school when she was 30 at the Gorey School  of Art in Wexford, Ireland. She then attended the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and received her M.F.A. in 2012.  The following year – while she was without a studio and painting in her kitchen – the American artist Richard Prince wanted to buy one of her works. From this sale she was able to build an impressive career as Prince bought more of her works and exhibited them at his bookstore gallery. He even published her first book.

Figgis explores the idea of luxury as shown in paintings and photographs throughout history. Her take on portraiture is based on photographs of luxury life found in art books. Her figures are fictional aristocrats pictured in lofty interiors, stately country homes, or idyllic natural settings. They are dressed in elaborate clothing and are engaged in leisure activities available only for the very rich. She addresses issues related to conspicuous wealth, social hierarchies, and the absurdity of owning land, “owning and, standing over it, guarding it.

Her paintings appropriate the classic paintings of Boucher, Fragonard, Manet, Velazquez, Holbein, and Gainsborough. She reconstructs these “documents of previous worlds” into nightmarish scenes of depravity with her figures painted in swirling brushstrokes that smear everything together. 

In these paintings, Figgis appropriates an older, privileged world that shows faces distorted, grotesque, or macabre. “I love faces and costumes staring back from another time and place.” Her 2014 print, “The Swing After Fragonard,” is a satirical rendition of Fragonard’s “The Swing,” painted in 1767. For her, Fragonard’s painting “lures you into an innocent world, a specific moment in pre-revolutionary France.”  And she felt that his work was ripe for reinvention. 

Her portraits are disconcerting because of the blank expressions on the faces of her subjects, which suggest some type of dark intent. The blank faces create a sense of uncertainty, fear, or even disgust in the mind of the viewer. Their loosely rendered forms seem insubstantial. The mix of expressionistic marks, controlled gestures, figurative foregrounds, and abstract backgrounds turns traditional subject matter on its head.

In collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, Figgis made an animated film set to music from Donizetti’s opera “Roberto Devereux.”  It was presented by the Met’s own art gallery, Gallery Met, during the intermission of the Met’s live HD broadcast of the opera. She has also made embroidered hand bags, based on her paintings, for Dior Lady Art.

Figgis has exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Brussels, Dublin, and Copenhagen. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smart Museum of Art, the X Museum, the Consortium Museum, and the Arts Council of Ireland. 

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