Claire Pestaille's work explores historical and contemporary iconography, examining the construction of femininity through the disruption of photographic imagery. Uncannily bewitching and intricately delicate, her artwork exudes dualities of beauty and horror, glamour and subversion.  The source material for her work includes portraiture from the Golden Age of Hollywood incorporating film stills along with contemporary and vintage photography. These snapshot images containing memories of a past age fulfill a sense of nostalgia, identity and authorship which are transformed and re-imagined through the act of photography, collage and painting.  A new conversation or connection becomes established through the deconstruction of one image and its marriage with another.  Pestaille adopts a variety of methods  in order to produce these often,  psychologically charged works. The final result questions the conceptual nature of the image and our relationship to it, offering an alternative way of seeing and understanding the collective memory of images pervasively part our cultural landscape.

 

Claire Pestaille lives and works in London, UK. 

She graduated fron the Royal College of Art in 2000 and has since exhibited internationally, including France, Vienna, Switzerland, USA and Hong Kong. Her work is in private collections including The Saatchi Collection, The Zabludowicz Collection, Project New Art Netherlands, TI Group Art Collection, Kate Moss, Soho House, The Vault at The Ned and Cafe Royal.

Limited edition prints of Pestaille's work can be purchased via www.laurentdelaye.com/artists/25-claire-pestaille/

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