<< YCBA Home Yale Center for British Art Yale Center for British Art << YCBA Home

YCBA Collections Search

 
IIIF Actions
Creator:
Julie Roberts, born 1963
Title:

Gynæcology Chair

Former Title(s):

Gynæcology Treatment Couch (Blues)

Date:
1994
Medium:
Oil and acrylic on canvas
Dimensions:
60 x 60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)
Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund
Copyright Status:
© The Artist
Accession Number:
B1997.5
Classification:
Paintings
Collection:
Paintings and Sculpture
Subject Terms:
abstract art | blue | couch | depression (illness) | female | hospital | medicine | Minimalist | photographic | pillow | representation | science
Access:
Not on view
Note: To make an appointment to see this work, please contact the Paintings and Sculpture department at ycba.paintings@yale.edu. Please visit the Paintings and Sculpture collections page on our website for more details.
Link:
https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:106
Export:
XML
IIIF Manifest:
JSON

Julie Roberts trained in London, Glasgow, and, Budapest and now lives and works in southern Scotland. Gynæcology Chair belongs to an early set of works, made in the early 1990s, which tackled the oppression of the female body. Here the gynecological chair is painted in almost uncanny realism yet floats untethered upon a blue ground so that, divorced from any medical context, it starts to resemble a weapon or an instrument of torture. Roberts was inspired by the ideas of the then fashionable French poststructuralist thinker Michel Foucault and the work of contemporary feminist theorists, as philosophers such as Susan Bordo were focusing their critical writing in the early 1990s on the intersection of the female body and culture. The clinical scrutiny of the female body, while ostensibly therapeutic, simultaneously defines female bodies as objects to be disciplined and controlled. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2020



Julie Roberts trained in London, Glasgow, and Budapest and now lives and works in southern Scotland. Gynæcology Chair belongs to an early set of works, made in the early 1990s, which tackled the oppression of the female body. Here the gynecological chair is painted in almost uncanny realism yet floats untethered upon a blue ground so that, divorced from any medical context, it starts to resemble a weapon or an instrument of torture. Roberts was inspired by the ideas of the then fashionable French poststructuralist thinker Michel Foucault, as well as the work of contemporary feminist theorists, when philosophers such as Susan Bordo were focusing their critical writing in the early 1990s on the intersection of the female body and culture. The clinical scrutiny of the female body, while ostensibly therapeutic, simultaneously defines female bodies as objects to be disciplined and controlled. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016

Figuring Women - The Female in Modern British Art (Yale Center for British Art, 2008-03-28 - 2008-06-08) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

Revisiting Traditions [BAC 20th century painting & sculpture] (Yale Center for British Art, 2002-04-30 - 2005-05-18) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

20th Century Paintings and Sculpture (Yale Center for British Art, 2000-01-27 - 2000-04-30) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]


If you have information about this object that may be of assistance please contact us.