Artwork Title: Resurrection of the Waitress

Resurrection of the Waitress, 1984

Honoré Sharrer

Artwork Title: Resurrection of the WaitressArtwork Title: Resurrection of the WaitressArtwork Title: Resurrection of the WaitressArtwork Title: Resurrection of the Waitress
...In more recent work, Ms. Sharrer was often concerned with women’s roles, as in her painting “Resurrection of the Waitress” (1984), in which a bosomy, half-naked angel snags a drowning woman by the hair with a rotary eggbeater and pulls her from the water. [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/arts/13sharrer.html] ...If you're thinking that gender played a role in her marginalization, you're partially right, but two other factors loom larger. The first is that she was generally tagged as either an expressionist or a surrealist and neither of those labels fits comfortably. Some critics today call her work magical realism and though that handle has problems as well, it's closer to the mark. Surrealism is a definitional moving target, but it's hard to place Sharrer's work amidst company such as Dali, Magritte, Picasso, Tanguy, or Maher. Once you know that she was inspired by mythology, art history, nursery rhymes, and popular culture, there's nothing particularly enigmatic about her symbols or intentions. If there are other artists to whom she most compares, it's probably Paul Cadmus, or maybe Frida Kahlo in her non-figurative guise. (Kahlo was also sometimes called a surrealist and it wasn't accurate for her either.) One of Sharrer's more intriguing canvasses is titled Resurrection of the Waitress and it has odd elements such as pulled back hair, an eggbeater, a razor blade, and a bare-breasted airborne woman. But when you learn that she's telling the story of a drowning victim by riffing off a 15th century Bosch painting (Ascent of the Blessed), Sharrer's canvas is simply offbeat, not mysterious.... [http://off-centerviews.blogspot.nl/2017/12/see-honore-sharrers-work-before-it.html]
Uploaded on Dec 15, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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