Stagecraft (Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening)
Karla Marchesi
- Sitter: Self Portrait
- Medium: Oil on Linen
- Dimensions: 165cm x 152cm
- Representation: Jan Manton Gallery
- Categories: Female artist
About the artwork
In this self-portrait, Karla Marchesi is barely visible. A partial nude figure, she is obscured behind a tangled botanical mass, vegetation bursting through a staged interior. A distant storm on the horizon adds to the tone of instability.
The work references Lucian Freud’s Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (1967–68), in which Freud’s self-portrait is engulfed by a singular houseplant, the plant standing in for inner experience. Marchesi echoes his composition but expands the plant’s role further, allowing it to consume the figure entirely. “The botanical forms give material shape to the figure’s interior world,” she writes. “Tangled and proliferating, they suggest competing desires, anxieties and memories that resist easy resolution.” A quiet acknowledgement of conditions that cannot be controlled.
Brisbane born and now living in Berlin, this is a portrait of someone caught between worlds, between old and new, concealment and disclosure, hope and what lies beyond the horizon.
About the artist
Karla Marchesi is a contemporary painter living and working in Berlin. A graduate of Queensland College of Art, she is best known for her Baroque punk reinterpretations of the seventeenth century Impossible Bouquet genre, reimagined through a contemporary maximalist lens. She is represented by Jan Manton Gallery, Brisbane and Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne and her work is held in collections internationally.
