Bare Shouldered Beauty and the Pink Creature

Description

In Bare Shouldered Beauty and the Pink Creature, Suellen Rocca combined imagery inspired by hieroglyphics, advertisements, Sears catalogues, and children’s books to create a dreamscape of consumerist artifacts and tokens of womanhood. Some of these references are recognizable: price tags, furniture, and young girls playing. Others are organic yet inscrutable, unsettlingly familiar despite their illegibility. Overwhelming in its abundance of visual motifs, this work examines the fraught relationship between women and media. Rocca was a member of the Hairy Who, a collective of graduates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago whose work both complicated and poked fun at social mores such as gender, sexuality, beauty, and consumerism.

Bare Shouldered Beauty and the Pink Creature

Suellen Rocca

1965

Accession Number

234461

Medium

Oil on canvas, on two joined panels

Dimensions

211.5 × 151.7 cm (83 1/4 × 59 3/4 in.), each 83 1/4 × 119 1/2 overall

Classification

painting

Museum

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, United States

Credit Line

Frederick W. Renshaw Acquisition and Carol Rosenthal-Groeling Purchase funds