Artist Statement -

My name is Vivian George, and I am an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with classical oil painting techniques. My practice reflects my experiences as a woman in contemporary society while drawing deliberate parallels between present-day ideologies and those embedded within Renaissance art. My engagement with art history is not passive admiration, but an active dialogue; I return to historical imagery as a site of confrontation, reinterpretation, and resistance.

My recent work reimagines mythological narratives that were popularized and romanticized by male Renaissance painters. These artists often used mythology as a socially permissible framework to depict sexual violence against women, aestheticizing trauma and reinforcing patriarchal ideals of beauty, passivity, and control. In response, I reclaim these narratives by reversing the power dynamics within them. Through acts of dissection, mutilation, and the destruction of the male form, I symbolically enact revenge and restoration for the women who were historically objectified and violated. In doing so, I challenge the visual legacy that helped normalize the consumption of the female body and shaped enduring perceptions of women within Western art and culture.

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I am deeply interested in the unstable boundary between the grotesque and the beautiful. Using soft, naturalistic body forms, delicate palettes, and dreamlike, yet often nightmarish, imagery, I create scenes that initially seduce the viewer before revealing underlying tension and violence. Distorted anatomy, unsettling juxtapositions, and romanticized brutality disrupt expectations of harmony and aesthetic pleasure. By merging horror with beauty, I question traditional hierarchies that separate the alluring from the repulsive, asking whether violence can be aestheticized and whether the grotesque can possess its own form of beauty.

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Art, for me, is a space to disrupt inherited narratives, reclaim agency, and reimagine historical mythologies through a contemporary feminist lens. By confronting the past and reshaping its imagery, I seek to expose the structures that have defined femininity and to create new visual languages where women are no longer passive subjects, but active agents of power, transformation, and defiance.