Sanné Mestrom: A Body is a Banquet
VAULT talks to Sanné Mestrom, a Netherlands-born artist based in the Blue Mountains. Known for sensuous sculptures of the female body that wink back at the Modernists, she defies their single-minded gaze by creating nudes that are at once playful, practical, tender and gravitational.
Image credit: Sanné Mestrom, To Trickle/ We Drift, 2021, bronze or concrete, two pieces 58.5 x 41.5 x 40 cm (overall) edition of 3 plus 2 artist's proofs. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney
Sanné Mestrom doesn’t want you to simply look at her art; she wants you to embody the work and be embodied by it. Her human-scale sculpture Nyotaimori (Reclining Nude) (2021) beckons to us through abstracted curving forms that imply outspread legs, a powerful torso and mounded breasts. The brutalist concrete surface has a rough-hewn monumentality, as though smoothed by the touch of many hands. This figure was the centrepiece of Mestrom’s exhibition Body as Verb at Sydney’s Sullivan+Strumpf in 2021 and has a horizontal thrust that allows her to double as a dining table, inviting people to sit down, to touch, to eat.
At first, Nyotaimori seems to fill the mould of Modernist reclining nudes: sexually available for Modigliani and Picasso, abstracted to anonymity for Brancusi and Moore – a lightning rod for the libidinous gaze. And yet, Mestrom disrupts the assumption that the combination of furniture and female body is an objectifying metamorphosis. “For me, that reclining nude body, that’s a gift. She’s not submissive, she’s not being objectified by men. She’s sharing herself with women, with children, with partners, with lovers – she’s giving and hopefully being given to. Why do we assume that it’s a one-way stream?”
For Mestrom, this generosity and openness is not just an erotic offering. She holds in dialogue the sexual, the maternal and the creative, noting that since becoming a mother, “my body is always in servitude to the people I love and to the world actually, and that doesn’t need to be perverse. I think we’re all in servitude to each other, and I think that [realisation] has just come with age and ...Subscribe to read this article in full
