Hannah Lupton Reinhard, an artist rooted in Los Angeles, delves into the complex tapestry of her Jewish heritage through her vibrant oil paintings. Her work intricately balances the nuances of Jewish rituals with contemporary artistic expression, creating a vivid interplay of tradition and modernity. Reinhard’s paintings emerge as more than mere depictions; they are bold explorations of culture, history, and identity. Through the use of bright colors and intricate patterns, she transforms traditional Jewish symbols into striking visual narratives that challenge us to reevaluate their perceptions of cultural identity. Her art encapsulates the dual nature of Jewish customs and storytelling, offering a stage where humor, beauty, and complexity perform in unison. As intricate as her brushstrokes are, her pieces demand an exploration beyond the surface to uncover the layers of memory, emotion, and meaning infused within each canvas.
Reinhard’s artistic approach is characterized by an evocative over-performance, where femininity and cultural symbols intertwine in a dynamic dance across her canvas. By accentuating elements such as hair, lips, and eyes, she navigates the delicate boundary between the beautiful and the strange, the real and the fantastical. This melding of imagery serves as a metaphoric exploration of identity, as the Jewish woman emerges both as a nurturer and a mischievous, enigmatic figure. The artwork commands attention with its vibrant allure, yet urges a deeper contemplation to uncover the emotional spectrum and tensions beneath its bold facade. This transformative journey through Reinhard’s paintings encourages a reevaluation of both personal and shared histories, as observers are gently nudged to reconcile the contradictions and harmonies existing within traditional narratives and modern-day self-discovery.
Judaism is a performative religion that relies deeply on the generational handing-down (L’dor v’dor) of traditions throughout a community. It is a religion of story-telling that has maintained itself through the repetition of narratives, and the rituals that come with them. It is a culture that relies on humor to cope with old histories, and create new ones. Through the depiction and repetition of ritual objects, I want my paintings to over-perform and exaggerate Jewish rituals, while simultaneously hiding their Jewishness, burying it in color, pattern, ornament, and femininity. And through an over-performance of femininity–hair, lips, eyes, hands–I want to teeter between the lines of ugliness and beauty, the real and the unreal, memory and photography, heavy-handedness and delicacy. I seek to depict the Jewish woman as mischievous yet nurturing, desirable yet frightening, beautiful yet strange, almost like a siren or fairy or other-worldly creature… I want to force the viewer to dig past the initial sort of bait, the shiny finish, and find the complicated, hard-to-articulate feelings.
Hannah Lupton Reinhard
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