ESMERALDA KOSMATOPOULOS

“MOTHER! " explores, through three bodies of works, the notion of femininity in all its complexity by looking at the first image we have of a woman - our mother - and one of the first places where we connect with femininity - her breast. In MOTHER!, Kosmatopoulos invites us in a poetic journey through time and space, body and cosmos, public and intimate that the artist has undertaken to understand her feminine identity and all the elements - both internal and external - that contributed to define it.
 

“Eclipse” questions two symbols that represent, in their own way, femininity in the collective consciousness. Next to the mystical and poetic image of the lunar woman, comes another much more ambiguous symbol of the woman that links her directly to her corporeality: her breast.  The series of photographs shows a round and full moon which gradually gets covered by another sphere of similar size, shape and texture - that of a mammogram of the artist. 

 

In the series of large collages “from her to the moon", the artist shares her own memory as a woman of her mother’s breast, and looks at this all-too-often idealized and forever-lost golden age of unconditional love and safety beyond criteria of gender and sexuality. Here again, the artist appropriates the symbol of the full moon that she covers with close up photographs of her own breast, creating a new imaginary lunar landscape made of areola, skin pores, beauty marks and stretch marks that her adult arms are trying to grasp and hold. 

"You must always be pretty," "You must take care of your husband and your home," "You must be a good mother…” but at the same time, "You must be a strong and independent woman,”  "You must stay free to do whatever you want with your body," "You must never let any man stop you…”. In the series  “femme des années 80" , Kosmatopoulos takes  some of the rules taught by her mother about how to become the "perfect woman" and turns them into sculptures. Each piece works as an assemblage of found objects that together tell one story of what a woman should be in the eyes of the society of the ‘80s and beyond.

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