Welded steel, 9 x 27 x 11, 2019.
Odalisque comes from the Turkish odalık, a woman of the room: a servant of the harem, who waited on the household. European painters from Ingres to Matisse made her a reclining nude. The sculpture keeps both figures. It lies long and low like the divans of those pictures, and a cup stands at one end, a servant’s attribute.
The blue and white surface adds a second thing the West took from the East and put in its rooms. Porcelain was the real article the West collected there, and the odalisque was the image it invented there, and both were arranged in European interiors to be looked at. The work is both: a figure laid out on a divan and a piece of china in a cabinet.
