Judy Chicago

Driving the World to Destruction, 1988
Serigraph on tan Rives BFK paper

Paper/Image Dimensions:
30 x 40 1/4 inches
(76.2 x 102.2 cm)

Edition of 50, 5AP, 5Roman, Numeraled
Unframed

Signed “Judy Chicago 1988” bottom right



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In 1982-87, Chicago investigated the toxic construct of masculinity. While traveling through Italy in 1982, Chicago was inspired by the style and scale of Renaissance painting, though she noted that, of course, it served to heroize the male as the harbinger of reason and virtue. Images of heroic men would of course return to more overtly evil ends with fascist neoclassicism. To combat this, Chicago renders the male body in the statuesque Renaissance style and oftentimes with the same horizontality of the frieze to different ends: to expose the destructive and petulant nature of masculinity. Jonathan D. Katz describes the series as in line with deconstructionist/conceptual art, “In appropriating a tradition of heroic masculinity in order to dissect and undercut a tradition of heroic masculinity, Chicago thus makes irony her handmaiden, the very irony that was, at the time these works were first shown, increasingly in evidence as a means of resistance across the art world at large.”


Printed at Unified Arts, Albuquerque, NM