Siouxsie with Fabulous Fake Flowers

JOHN DOVE AND MOLLY WHITE

Siouxsie with Fabulous Fake Flowers

signed by both artists (on the reverse)

inkjet and acrylic on canvas

41 3/4 x 41 3/4 inches (106 x 106 cm)

Executed in 2024.

Siouxsie Sioux emerged from the Bromley Contingent surrounding the Sex Pistols before establishing herself as one of the most distinctive figures in British punk; through her work with Siouxsie and the Banshees, she helped define the transition from punk into post-punk, her confrontational style, theatrical image and uncompromising musical experimentation exerting a profound influence on generations of musicians and designers alike.

The present work returns to John Dove and Molly White's Face series, first introduced at Kitsch-22, 22 Woodstock Street, London in 1976–77, with Siouxsie Sioux as Face No. 2 (after Bowie) — translated here, almost half a century later, into a new compositional and material register. The original 1970s Face series was conceived around the idea of urban tribal make-up: face-paint printed separately from the bleached portrait, as an abstract pattern read as the new face-paint of the tribes of London. The 2024 Siouxsie with Fabulous Fake Flowers re-stages that idea as a digital print on canvas with the flowers painted in acrylic — Dove and White's punk-era idiom translated into the medium register of contemporary gallery painting, the Face No. 2 portrait set among saturated, hyperreal flowers that pull the image into a post-Warhol pop-floral grammar.

PROVENANCE:

From the personal archive of John Dove and Molly White