2026 Finalists

For 50 years feminist scholars like Laura Mulvey and John Berger have discussed the
numerical dominance of the female nude in painting. I wanted to know how the situation
looks in my country, so I went through the painting collections of 4 museums from 4 of the
biggest cities. Out of 534 nudes that depicted only men or women 79.6% depicted women
and 20.4% men. Based on these statistics, I made a series of paintings where instead of a
female spectacle I flipped it into a male one, describing the statistics of female nudes visually
using the male body. In my series I depict the same amount of half-nudes, the same amount
of standing poses and the same amount of faces left out. The aim of these paintings is to bring
out the absurdity of the ratio, equalise it, not add to it and expand ways in which the male
nude can be depicted in general.
Seeing that there is a narrative of “catching up to men” (with wages, political rights) in
feminism, the painting style is fast and sketchy. On top of that, too perfectly rendered pieces
would undermine my own negative feelings towards the topic. The pink-purple-orange color
scheme is a nod to them representing the female statistics. The paintings also knowingly fall
on the lighter side of value, to diversify male depictions that often lack in a delicate narrative.
On top of that all poses were inspired by female paintings found from the analysis, to
emphasise the fact that gender is a costume, poses being something staged the model has to
hold for hours, not necessarily something inherent to them. 40% of the 80th board was
masked off to represent the 0.6% in the title of the series, making it a true visual description
of real statistics.

(21/25)