Are you still watching? 
– after François Boucher
oil paint on canvas
2021 

François Boucher’s Rococo painting Resting Girl (Louise O’Murphy), 1751 has undergone a 2020s update. She lies across her sofa surrounded by hallmarks of our time: online food delivery, wine, ‘self-care’ and the ever-present mobile phone. Items of leisure and luxury, but also the expectations of how she should appear in public. She does not engage with the viewer or with what’s going on outside and even seems disengaged in what she’s looking at. In our viewing of her in this time, are we engaging with her the same way a viewer would’ve a nude female figure in 1752?

This painting was part of the 2021 Wundergym + Wyndham City Council art program and exhibition MAKE SOME NOISE. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns the planned exhibition had to be shifted to a public art outcome, with prints of works pasted up in the Station Place Laneway in Werribee, Victoria. There was also a follow-up exhibition, Salon des Wunder Gym, held for this and other iterations of Wundergym who’s exhibition outcomes were impacted by the pandemic lockdowns. Due to my selling the work and moving to regional Victoria a print was hung in lieu of the actual work. 

The painting referenced, François Boucher’s Resting Girl (Louise O’Murphy), 1751: