Lesley Brook — Nov 5, 2023

Anita DeSoto's paintings challenge misogyny by recasting women's and men's figures.

In baroque paintings the ways in which women are portrayed betrays the patriarchal society of the painters and their clients. Victims or pawns, accessories or seductresses, even goddesses and empresses are seen in relation to men. This period in history was also the time of the witch hunts, when fear of witchcraft meant many women were ostracized and killed. 

Painter and lecturer Anita DeSoto has been reinterpreting baroque paintings in her own work. In Anita's paintings male figures are rendered impotent, turned into trees or stones, as if by a spell. This leaves the women front and centre, no longer defined by their relationships to men.  Most recently Anita's work has been exploring representations of fecundity and fertility, including the usually invisible subject of menstruation.

Although women seem to have greater freedom of roles now, misogyny is still alive and well. For example, women are still being blamed for enchanting men, for leading them on, for inflaming lust, for saying no. Anita's work is therefore not just a commentary on history but relevant to the ways in which we see women today.