Luncheon on the Grass

The Girls borrow from Manet’s Lancheon on the Grass of 1863 the female gaze that stares into the eyes of the world, challenging its need to maintain a pretense of harmony and propriety. The artists appropriate this gaze of the woman in the painting, who appears naked yet strong in her nudity, in an attempt to confront fear with equal determination. A net full of fragile eggs hangs over them. Debris gradually creates an inhospitable layer on which a body will be placed. The egg, a shell that holds life, creativity, and longing, becomes the object of both desire and the anguish of its loss. The artists will try to carry it and lay it with reverence on this inhospitable altar they have created. Some survive to the end while others break along the way. The antithesis between the fragility of the egg and the hardness of the stone, the soft body on the rubble, and the eggs that accidentally break despite prudence, maintain a constant tension between different notions such as pleasure and discomfort, desire and resignation, life and death.