Gynæcology Chair

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

Credit Line: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund