Goshka Macuga

Goshka Macuga is a graduate of Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths, University of London. She works in various media, creating collages, installations and tapestries. In 2008 she was shortlisted for one of the most important artistic distinctions, the Turner Prize. In her work she often addresses the stories of well-known artists, male and female, raising questions about the place of women in history and art institutions. Archival research is an unusually important aspect of her methodology. Her works have been shown at such venues as Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, Tate Britain in London, and Zachęta in Warsaw.

This collage arose from Goshka Macuga’s research in the archive of the British painter and photographer Paul Nash (1889–1946) at the Tate Gallery in London. Nash was one of the most recognized 20th-century British painters associated with Surrealism. In the Second World War he was appointed a war artist and worked with the RAF. His most famous painting from this period is Totes Meer (Dead Sea), presenting crashed German planes in Cowley, Oxford. The painting was based on photographs made by Nash in situ. Macuga used these photos of wrecks in her collage, but she juxtaposed Nash’s photographs with a picture of a woman reclining in a sensual pose, from the archive of Nash’s partner, the British Surrealist Eileen Agar (1899–1991). Thus Macuga not only combines an iconic depiction of wartime destruction with a sensual take on the female body, exploring the culturally familiar motifs of Eros and Thanatos, but also questions the connections between male and female libido and the role that female sexuality, or rather its denial, plays in contemporary culture.