Multi-talented artist and leading voice of “New-Wave Feminism”, Petra Collins has been commissioned by the Tate Modern to create a short film to celebrate their major retrospective of American modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe. The collection is the first UK exhibition of her work for over twenty years and the first show to open in the new Tate Modern building.
Collins’s images offer an unflinching honesty, exploring the privacies and publicities of growing up as a woman at a moment when female bodies are ubiquitously hyper-mediated by Photoshop and social media. Collins’ stunning short film draws on a handful of O’Keeffe’s most celebrated works, giving these paintings a new lease of life and meaning in 2016.
On the short film Petra comments, “O’Keeffe was one of the first artists that made me appreciate color in a whole new way. Her use of it makes me feel like her landscapes are complex beings. That with each stroke of color, each line, each curve, she’s bringing these locations to life. With this short I wanted each girl to really play with their surroundings (that were inspired by O’Keeffe’s desert and Lake George – her two favourite spots) – to use their every inch of skin, muscle, bone, etc and really put themselves into her landscape too – while making their own.”