Flora Temnouche b. 1995, Paris, FR
90 x 130 cm
This work references the many portraits Bonnard painted of his wife Marthe in the bath - across fifty years he painted her hundreds of times, always hovering at the edge of abstraction. Flora steps into the same art-historical scene but inverts it: by making the work a self-portrait, she collapses the distance between painter and painted, becoming both observer and observed. The overhead perspective and the mirror she holds push this further still - rather than being watched from the outside, she studies herself on her own terms, reclaiming the bath as a space of creative self-possession.