Swetlana Heger
Thierry Goldberg Projects, New York, USA
The Czech-born, Berlin-based artist Swetlana Heger began her ‘Playtime’ project in 2002, for which she initiated collaborations with brands like Hermès and Adidas, and devised a series of self-portraits-cum-fashion shoots using the brands’ clothing. That Heger managed to find partners at all is remarkable given her ambivalence about the market. It’s less surprising that she’s on her own for her latest exhibition, ‘Lipstick Economy’. Borrowing from the idea of the ‘lipstick index’, chairman of Estée Lauder Leonard Lauder’s observation that lipstick sales rise as the economy sinks, Heger has mounted a show that is both a tribute to the woman who can smile on through and a satire of how the market must lower its sights as times demand.
The most covetable object is a black and white self-portrait photograph, tinged with Weimar glamour, which Heger has used as the basis of two works, Lipstick Economy (YSL in Red Taboo) (all works 2009) and Lipstick Economy (Dior Addict in Gipsy Red). The former is framed in gold, the latter in silver, but the key difference lies in the fact that Heger has used a different lipstick to ‘sign’ each piece in the bottom-left with a single kiss. Each picture is thus ‘unique’ in its way, but as there would be no profit without mounds of the stuff, Heger has produced each in an edition of 150. Like the art dealer who never worried about hiding excess stock, she displays six of each here in rows (seriality is surely more essential to the market than to the artist).
Alternative versions of the same schtick appear in a series of three similarly titled works on high-class paper, which bear nothing more than a single kiss from a pair of lipsticked lips. And, completing the ensemble – slightly too inevitably – is a wall-piece comprising a panel of small mirrors adorned in more lipstick with the title of the show (and the work itself). It’s all slyly appealing – and of course timely – yet these days, artists seeking to take on the behemoth capital have to look less like crafters working in an old economy, and more like chameleon hot-deskers. For all her class and comedy, Heger looks like she’s just lining up to sell her wares. At US$150 a pop for the prints – a price-point not immaterial to the purpose of the work – she may have some luck.
Morgan Falconer
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