XXXora : The Newer Gender

A hermaphrodite artist by the name of XXXora is making waves in the art world with her debut solo exhibition at the Vyner Street Gallery 14-24th June 2012, entitled THE NEWER GENDER.

XXXora’s paintings – large figurative works on canvas, with a consistent, distinctive use of greyscale backgrounds and monochrome foregrounds – explore gender, celebrity and capitalism, their bold use of iconography forcing viewers to ask who has become prominent in the neo-liberal age and how they used the social constructs of masculinity and femininity to advance themselves. As questions mount about how Margaret Thatcher will be remembered (and buried), XXXora offers a visual critique of the Iron Lady’s image far more savage than anything in Meryl Streep’s most visceral dreams.

Amongst the highlights are Margaret Thatcher’s Tea Party, where Britain’s first female Prime Minister is joined by others whose fame was magnified by their subversion of gender conventions – XXXora plays with the personas of David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Grace Jones, Boy George and Michael Jackson, who, as she tells the camera in one of several short films, “is like the real American dream … born a black man but died a white woman”.

The winners – androgynous superstars who did not threaten the hegemony of Thatcherism – appear the losers: Marx (and Marxism), and the miners defeated in the battles of 1984/85, frequently neglected in the glossy celebrations of England’s Eighties which reminisce about the New Pop and the nouveau riche.

This was a time when traditional emphasis on masculinity was challenged by the fashionable androgyny of pop culture, yet queer communities were ravaged by the government’s wilful ignorance of AIDS, and LGBT youth were silenced by Section 28. Now, XXXora looks to a future where femininity is finally considered an equal to masculinity and where the space between male and female extends far beyond our wildest imaginations.

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