Elizabeth Romhild’s latest work in sculpture and painting offer a robust vision of the pleasures of sensuality. Her full-figured female forms celebrate their bodies with an exceptional sense of immediacy. They move, turn, gesticulate and dance; and occasionally the artist includes symbols that enhance the physicality of the works.
The spirit of joie de vivre, of course, emanates from Elizabeth’s current works. However, this spirit belies more complex understandings. For a start, her rotund and fleshy women challenge pervasive traditions for representing the female body. Unconventionally beautiful, the artist’s figures are not idealized and not the typical object of masculine notions of feminine desirability. Instead, Elizabeth explores distinct understandings of self-possession. Her women appear unfettered by social and cultural constraints as they insist on their sense of individual expressiveness.
However, this is not to say that Elizabeth ’s works do not belong to a grand tradition of visual art. In fact, her expert rendering of the human body in paint, clay and bronze is on a continuum with art historical representations of the human body in terms of naturalism; and, in particular, Baroque engagements with what it means to excite the senses in such terms. Artistic importance is usually borne of both understanding and challenging received forms and interpretations; Elizabeth knows this well and offers a great spin on her precedents.
