Loose woman 2 1988

Sergei Parajanov made this collage called Loose Woman 2, and it’s about 46 x 37 cm. It’s hard to tell exactly when it was made, but with collage, it’s always a process of building and layering. The material here is so interesting: this layering of the female form, the duplication of a face onto the breasts. There’s a real physicality to it, like he’s really trying to reconstruct something. This process-based way of working, where you’re constantly building and reworking, is what brings out the emotion in the piece, this sense of fragmentation and re-assemblage. Look at that hand covering the eyes. It’s like a screen, a way of hiding or censoring. This relates to the whole piece, as though it asks us to look again at the layers of image-making that make up the idea of ‘woman’. Parajanov reminds me of Hannah Hoch, who also used collage to cut up and remake images of women and address the idea of female identity. Both artists use fragmentation to suggest that identity can be unfixed and fluid.