Charlotte Colbert speak to Jean-Paul Pryor of AnOther Magazine about her latest installation Benefit Supervisor Sleeping, which seeks to reframe the story of Lucien Freud's infamous muse, Sue Tilley.
"Benefit Supervisor Sleeping is amongst the most famous portraits by the late Lucian Freud. One of a series of four paintings of his muse-in-local-government-employ Sue Tilley, it sold for £35 million one decade ago – a somewhat ironic signifier of the excesses of the post-capitalist era, given both its title and subject.
It’s a painting that radically challenged the medium of portraiture in its time, and has always held a special fascination for the renowned image-maker and contemporary artist Charlotte Colbert, who has chosen to reframe its infamous subject, one body-part at a time, for a whole new generation via a 170kg video installation at Shoreditch’s Unit 9 Gallery. In this rusted, wrought metal 21st-century version of the seminal portrait, Colbert addresses the strange interplay of projection, intimacy and representation across the passage of time that is arguably at the core of all portraiture, and seeks to reclaim the subject herself from the role of passive muse.”
– John-Paul Pryor
