Farley Aguilar
(Managua, Nicaragua, 1980 - )
The Beach
2018
Oil, oil stick, and graphite on linen
76 x 92 1/2 in. (193.0 x 235.0 cm)
Collection of the Akron Art Museum
Purchased with funds from The Mary S. and Louis S. Myers Endowment Fund for Painting and Sculpture
2019.4
Courtesy of the artist and Lyles & King, New York
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Farley Aguilar reinterprets historical photographs in oil paint and graphite, creating unsettling images that reveal sinister undertones of psychological unrest. In The Beach, which Aguilar based on a vintage picture of a seaside beauty pageant from the 1920s or ‘30s, a crowd mills about in swimwear. The lurid colors and expressive scribbles over the figures’ faces create a strange tension and call to mind zombies and other supernatural creatures. In particular, the Xs and scratching over the mouths and torsos of female figures suggest questions of female agency in both paintings and situations such as beauty pageants, where women become objects of display.