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Monica Majoli
Monica Majoli (born 1963 in Los Angeles CA ) is a female American cult artist whose artwork examines the relationship between physicality and consciousness, expressed through the documentary sexual image. Her art explores and documents different experiences in sex, sexuality, and some aspects of alternative lifestyles, commonly known as BDSM.

Education
Majoli earned her MFA (1992) and BA (1989) from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied fine arts and refined her painting and drawing skills that she now uses to create unique series of work. She is now a Professor of Art in Painting and Graduate Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She has also taught at UC Berkeley and the Graduate Studies program at Yale University School of Art.

Early Works (1990 - 1998
According to the Whitney Museum of American Art, Majoli's "figurative paintings from the early 1990s to the present have depicted scenes of sexual fetishism." Majoli's work Investigates "themes and rituals of identity, intimacy, and mortality" and "is both a site for catharsis and an admission of its irresolution." In her early works, she focused on oil painting in a style similar to Peter Paul Rubens in a method of layering binder and oil paint. She used this method and style to create highly detailed and realistic homocore scenes and depictions of her own body. These explicit paintings are said to be less so a focus on the physical experience itself than on the psychological aspects and consequences of these acts.

In an interview with Paulina McFarland for Art XX Magazine, Majoli stated, "My use of sexuality revolves around the desire to stimulate a visceral response in the viewer to the actualities of our physical nature. SM, which has been the dominant form of sexuality that I employ visually, is useful to me, as it highlights the psychological nature of sexuality and consciousness." These works in reference are explorations of both her sexuality and sexuality in general, including a life-size portrait of the artist holding a dildo, a possible reference to Linda Benglis' 1974 Artforum Ad, only much more intimate and personal.

Rubbermen (1999 - 2000)
Her Rubberman series was featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and the 2006 Berlin Biennial of Contemporary Art at KW Institute of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco all include her work in their permanent collections.

This series is a collection of soft watercolor painting depicting some rather harsh scenes of men in latex rubber fetish wear, many of them bound in rope and/or chains. The concept came in part from her high school experience of coming out with a male friend. This experience makes the use of gay male subjects in Majoli's art both familial and alien to the artist and the viewer. All of her subjects came from reality as opposed to fantasy, meaning she painted them as she saw them in real life. This stylized depiction of sexual activity alludes to sex as a tool, rather than a curiosity. The tonal palette and ethereal nature of wet-in-wet watercolor allow for the exploration of of deeper consciousness in relation to sexuality and the complications of intimacy.

Black Mirror (2009 - 2014)
In the Black Mirror series, Monica Majoli paints in a baroque style inspired by Caravaggio. The idea itself came from the black mirrors that encircled the house that she lived in at the time. Black Mirror, includes portraits of women that Majoli had had relations with, "their profiles drawn in close-up in coloured pencil, forming a chiaroscuro effect on the sheets of black paper." The "polished nocturnal portraits" are made from memory, and according to Majoli, "The otherworldly half-image that is reflected by black mirror coincides with both the internal state of desire and a crisis in belief in representational painting. In these works, the surface itself holds the fetishistic power, rather than the act depicted." In a sense, the work explores a separation of her and her Italian father (who inspired her to use lithography), by portraying her ex-lovers. The black is used to obscure them, and make them look like they're fading away from distance.

Current Work
Majoli’s work takes up the not uncomplicated problem of fact in an age of truthiness and at a time when painting’s engagement of the “theoretical” or “philosophical” is usually sluiced through the “abstract” or “nonrepresentational” ad nauseam, and in a manner that, contrary to the dominant critical modes, probes for “fact” while eschewing the photographic. While continuing her art studies and shows with the Air de Paris, Majoli also teaches Painting and Graduate Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Exhibitions
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