Kunz, Anita: Striking A Pose

What would Jimi Hendrix, Clint Eastwood, Ricky Gervais,
Stephen King, and over a hundred other pop culture icons
look like if they posed for your Live Drawing Class?
Inspired by her own art students' struggles and triumphs with nude life
drawing, Anita Kunz turns her brushes to nearly 150 speculative portraits of
famous figures, stripped of their vanities and as unpretentiously posed as life
models. Alone or grouped, male marvels and monsters and musicians stand,
lean, and sit for the imaginary eye of the acclaimed painter and illustrator.
Drawn with a casual wit, Kunz' caricatures combine with naturalism
to undercut the mystique of her subjects. The well-known faces become less
significant than the unknown bodies, as though the celebrities and creators are
descending from their pedestals to pose. Less directly comic or polemical than her
previous Another History of Art (Fantagraphics, 2021) Striking a Pose nevertheless
includes a feminist flip on the role of the nude model; Kunz upends historical gender
prejudices within the fine art world while also finding a welcoming humor in the
bathos of the naked body.
Anita Kunz is a Canadian-born artist who has worked for publishers and galleries
worldwide. Her oeuvre includes paintings, sculptures, commercial design, magazine
illustration and education, and book cover illustration.