VENUS CONTEMPORANEA (Museum Quality print) by Karla Betancourt

Karla Betancourt

VENUS CONTEMPORANEA, 2021

Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag® Ultra Smooth (305 gsm, 100% cotton)

101.6 x 76.2 cm  / 40 x 30 in 

Limited Edition of 100

Playboy Mexico Art Book Collection

Guadalajara, Mexico

$980 USD Print + Shipping

Exclusively at Reine Gallery.

Reine Text:

In VENUS CONTEMPORANEA, one of two works for this collection by Mexican artist, Karla Betancourt presents the world of celebrity in relation to female sexuality through her bright use of color and precise details. This work features recreations of Kim Kardashian’s perfume bottle whose shape is from a direct mold of Kim’s body. At the center of this multilayered neo-pop work, we have a plastic bottle that has been distorted to resemble the perfume bottles in the background. 

-Sway Gaytan (curator)

ARTIST TEXT

“VENUS,” mythologically the goddess of love, beauty and fertility. Art has produced many physical representations of the goddess. Many female nudes are often called “Venus” in art history, even if they may have been the portrait of a mortal woman rather than a cult image of the goddess.

Within this work I contrast two ideas regarding the issue of the status quo about the idea of ​​representations of “female beauty.”

In the foreground, we see a plastic bottle totally twisted in its center, resembling a waist. It is something that we could consider “garbage.” In the background, we can see the “KKW II” perfume bottles by Kim Kardashian (also plastic) which are her body in a true to scale mold. Kardashian is a woman whose beauty prototype has generated a market around her, to the point of generating cult products.

The sexual revolution gave rise to the vindication and full recovery of the human body and its nakedness as an integral part of the human condition, individually and socially, while questioning the traditional role of women.

In our contemporaneity, this value has led to a repetitive marketing validation. Although the work may have different readings, the central idea of ​​the piece is to encourage the viewer to critically think about ideals related to BEAUTY and FEMINITY and their association with CONSUMERISM.