Simon Fujiwara, Who are the Two Liberated Femmes Running the Beach?, 2023

Simon Fujiwara Who are the Two Liberated Femmes Running the Beach?, 2023

Acrylic, charcoal and pastel on canvas


180,3 x 250,5 cm (unframed)
205,5 x 275,5 x 6,1 cm (framed)

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A large-scale work executed in acrylic, pastel and charcoal on canvas, Who are the Two Liberated Femmes Running the Beach? is part of a series of works by Simon Fujiwara recreating iconic canons of art history through the depiction of Who the Bær.

Fujiwara's work draws on Pablo Picasso's 1922 painting Two Women Running on The Beach. The composition depicts two figures, both with the characteristics features of Who. Their characteristic long tongue, dripping with honey that splashes around them, in their hands objects that resemble smart phones. Caught in mid-action, the figures have a dynamic formal quality that echoes the kind of frenzy represented by the figures' absorption with their phones.

Fujiwara's source, Two Women Running on The Beach, dates to Picasso's so-called neoclassical period which developed in response to a visit to Italy in 1917 after which the artist adopted a classicizing formal vocabulary, part of a trend in 1920s painting, the so-called “return to order." At this time, artists such as Picasso began to negotiate a path from pre-war artistic developments, like analytical cubism, towards practices that eschewed abstraction. Greatly enlarged, Picasso's miniature painting was used for the curtain of the ballet production Le Train Bleu which had the theme “games on the beach.” Picasso produced neoclassical works from around 1917 until 1925.
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