Notes

This painting depicts Glenn Thomas Jacobs who found fame under his ring name ‘Kane’ in the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment). Featuring in the RAW franchise of the brand, Jacobs along with his contemporaries, Brock Lesnar, King Kong Bundy and John Cena were the subjects of Lizza Littlewort’s solo show Raw Overcooked at the Gerard Sekoto Gallery at the Alliance Française in 2005.

Taking her departure from the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss who used the phrase to contrast nature with culture in his book The Raw and the Cooked, Littlewort appropriates the methodology of his title by using ‘overcooked’ to describe the hyper masculine charade of entertainment wrestling where the stage-managed events of the game are far from natural and the game presents itself as a spectacle of manufactured obviousness.

Delicately rendering her subjects in tones of soft pinks, muted blues and subtle yellows, Littlewort manages to subvert these characters appearance by providing a painterly lens that softens and thereby complicates the viewers relationship with these stereotypes of inflated masculinity.

Exhibited

Gerard Sekoto Gallery, Alliance Française, Johannesburg, Raw Over-Cooked, 27 May to 15 June 2005.