The Orphan Girl at the Cemetery, a 19th-century portrait by Eugene Delacroix, is a work of rich tones and dramatic lighting meant to evoke the vulnerability of a lonely young woman and her tragic place in society.
The French-Algerian artist Djamel Tatah, reconfigures it as Sans Titre (Untitled; below), representing the richly layered subject of the original in flattened form and minimalist shades of brown and grey, against a two-tone background reminiscent of our era of digital art.
Eugene Delacroix’s 1830 masterpiece, Liberty Leading the People, represents the spirit of revolution in France, depicted here as a country united against oppression.
In her re-imagining (below), French-Swiss artist Agnes Thurnauer juxtaposes Delacroix’s imagery with an excerpt from Monique Wittig’s feminist novel Les Guérillères (The Women Warriors; 1969), which envisions a world in which women have overthrown patriarchy. Liberty rises from amid the sampling of text.
The Slippers, by 17th-century Dutch artist Samuel Van Hoogstraten, showcases a scene of quiet domesticity. The unconventional lack of human figures prompts reflections on the space.
(Below) Finnish artist Henni Alftan offers a modern perspective. “I didn’t copy it exactly – I tried instead to extract the essential in order to evoke a sequence of spaces by representing only a narrow part of it,” Alftan said in a statement.
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