Carmen Einfinger

seeCEOseen
Carmen Einfinger
Curated by Larry Walczak
March 16-31, 2007
Opening reception: March17, 6-8 pm Carmen Einfinger’s work evolves directly from her highly particular origins, upbringing, and life experience. Born in Great Britain to Dutch and Croatian parents, Einfinger grew up in the city of Santos, outside of Rio de Janeiro, spending her formative years in a strict girls’ boarding school, and eventually finding her way to Canada (where she worked as a fashion model) before turning her hand to painting in New York in the 1980s.In response to her mixed background, unpredictably fluctuating life circumstances, and peripatetic, multilingual existence, Einfinger has in the manner of such imaginative exiles. as Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Steinberg, who converted the anxieties of displacement and statelessness into artworks of cool, complex whimsy - created an oeuvre that amounts to a world of her own: discrete and unique, and constructed out of the artist’s own visual language and highly personal iconography.What’s more, Einfinger has expanded this world beyond the confines of the canvas or the photographic frame to include clothing, furniture and even built space (most notably, her sprawling SoHo loft). The outcome is a body of work that - in a manner optimistic, witty and embracing rather than exclusive and self-referential - is expressive of a fundamental human fact: that one’s first, most enduring creation, in response to the terrors and pleasures of circumstances, is one’s own universe, a creation we carry with us (and, inevitably, set up like campaign furniture) wherever we go.

This theme has found powerful expression in Einfinger’s two most recent projects. In last year’s show “Wild Girls,” at the NY Arts Beijing Gallery in China, the artist encouraged female students at the city’s International School - who, as was Einfinger in her own youth, are compelled to wear impersonal uniforms - to reclaim their individuality by painting portraits on their skirts and jackets. Einfinger has extended this concept with her latest exhibition, “seeCEOseen,” at the Broadway Gallery in New York. By persuading some of the most successful business people in America - aka “suits” - to sit for traditional CEO portraits wearing her own outlandishly painted corporate attire, Einfinger has wittily reversed her Beijing formula by imposing her own disorderly order on a condition noteworthy for its rigidly observed conventions. Rather than treating her subjects with ridicule, moreover, Einfinger exposes their secret solidarity with her own sensibility - their embrace of the playful and anarchic.
The result is droll, pointed and - as is always the case with this artist’s work - poignantly, messily human.
Broadway Gallery
473 Broadway, 7th floor
New York, NY 10013
T: 212-274 8994
 www.broadwaygallerynyc.com