Kirsten Glass (b. 1975)

'The thinking is... roughly... that the models from magazines are re-employed by me as templates for my painting activity and as hostesses to a stranger's encounter with the painting...Models are meant to be copied so I take the image and I make it mine. This is an act of possession, like taking a photograph, but, through the painting process, the copied model becomes flawed and reworked many times until she becomes part of an abstract negotiation and eventually emerges as a character or presence which is both less knowable and more particular... Overall, the transformation is from a magazine ideal to an alternative, subjective fantasy or you could say that the ideal commodity image gets lived in until she acquires a new life in a painting, following her perfect death in the photograph. The impossibly perfect commodity image, like any ideal, is never attainable; it is a modern Siren, shape-shifting and endlessly seductive, inviting us towards an eclipsed 'something else'.

In my work, painting itself- as a physical medium and a cultural
fantasy- is fetishised and reimagined as a decadent vanity, an empty
styling, an eroticised living death and ancient chameleon language
which perhaps uses us to continue. This is a vampire story.'
(K. Glass quoted on her website, reproduced at https://www.kirstenglass.com/kirsten-glass-2011.php).