Jansson Stegner born 1972 — a contemporary American figurative artist whose paintings, in a somewhat satirical vein, reflect contemporary Western society's ideas about gender roles.
Source: www.janssonstegner.com
The women in Stegner's paintings are very strong, muscular, mostly sportswomen with an ideal figure. But this ideal, of course, is completely unattainable in real life. Stegner deliberately distorts the proportions of the human body based on the ideas of mass culture.
Source: www.janssonstegner.com
The legs and arms of the ladies are elongated and muscular, the hips are very wide, as if they were bodybuilders on steroids, and the waist is narrow. It turned out to be at least unusual, although such hyperbolization may repel some viewers.
Source: www.janssonstegner.com
Stegner's paintings are partly reminiscent of classical English portraiture of the 19th century, especially when he paints not sporty women, but quietly sitting in an armchair in his rich mansion or men hunting. By the way, the men in Stegner's paintings, on the contrary, seem infantile and weak, with quite ordinary musculature, although even here not without stylization and distortion of proportions.
Source: www.janssonstegner.com
According to the artist, he has always been inclined towards art based on realism, but at the same time he tried to move away from the imposed academic rules and create based on his own ideas about the “right” pictures, where the main thing is maximum expressiveness, unusualness and the ability to display some of his ideas about beauty, masculinity and sexuality in the context of irony over mass culture and universally imposed stereotypes.
Source: www.janssonstegner.com
Stegner, like many American teenagers, has been interested in comic books since childhood. He gradually became so attracted to the art that he decided to enroll at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in order to become an artist himself and draw his own comics on a professional basis.
Source: www.janssonstegner.com
There, however, Stegner's interests changed somewhat. He was interested in paintings by artists such as Modigliani, Picasso or El Greco, where they expanded the idea of human body proportions and somewhat distorted them for the sake of artistic expression. Stegner even introduced his own term “Strange Figuration” and considers his work to be a continuation of their artistic traditions.
Source: www.janssonstegner.com
In addition, Stegner was always interested in sports, especially volleyball. He tried to reflect his admiration for professional volleyball players in his paintings and returned to this theme repeatedly over the course of 14 years. And here the distortion of proportions is minimal, irony gave way to sincere admiration for their beauty, agility and strength.
Source: www.janssonstegner.com
Source: www.janssonstegner.com
By the way, he considers his paintings to be the complete opposite of classical portraits, they are some kind of collective images, showing what reality could be, if you take to its logical conclusion all the gender stereotypes imposed by modern Western culture and notions of “strong-willed strong successful woman” and the ideal man.
Source: www.janssonstegner.com
Source: www.janssonstegner.com
Source: www.janssonstegner.com
Stegner now lives and works in New York. His paintings have many fans and he has been awarded several times with prestigious art prizes. In the end, he managed to form his own style and manner of execution, to find his own thing, and that is worth a lot.
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