Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf

As the world continues to wrestle with women’s issues, feminism, equal rights and gender identity, Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf’s life’s work has evolved from being a personal, enduring and devout study to a powerful body of work that highlights many conflicting questions.

Fontaine-Wolf has dedicated her career to painting the female form and her paintings capture something that has escaped many who have attempted to use women as their focus. Her work portrays the actual essence of being female; not as a model or object, a siren or sister, mother or child but somehow all of those things at once.  Each work contains power, fragility, beauty and rage richly combining emotions as well as style as she flicks deftly between figuration and abstraction with masterful ease. 

So to her palette, from pastels to deep inky black and now embracing red, on the canvas Fontaine-Wolf somehow presents the whole of womanhood in individual images.  The resulting paintings move men and women alike with her unflinching celebration of all of the female facets.

Her upcoming solo show The Moon’s Animal is her most bold series to date. Through this body of work Fontaine-Wolf tackles the realities of the everyday yet taboo subject of female puberty and fertility. This biological definer of womanhood, society’s most base reason for a woman’s existence, remarkably still remains an awkward subject mostly discussed in private whispers.  Young girls’ filled with anxiety of the unknown as their bodies change while women take hormones to control their “moods”, the natural cycles of the female still deemed inappropriate, inconvenient, embarrassing. 

Far more than attempting to confront time old taboos, Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf has developed a shaman like understanding and depiction of women and the female divine.  This outstanding series shows the tentative progression from child to woman, from innocence to ownership of the cycles of nature and life that fluctuate throughout every woman. The Moon’s Animal celebrates the oscillations of womanhood in all its splendour. Free from shame and full of an innocent and universal sexuality to be acknowledged, respected and protected. 

The Moon’s Animal opens 3rd November 5pm at Someth1ng Gallery, 52 Honor Oak Park