The Unseen

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50 x 70 cm

Beth Mohr is educated at the Art Academy in Amsterdam (Gerrit Rietveld Academie - in Art og Design)
Beth has always dealt with the common human in her art. She depicts the immediate impression of a scene in a spontaneous and vital painterly language, and often from a generous personal angle. Her artistic development has led her from dealing with the experience of women-memories to now taking a greater interest in current living conditions for women. Beth combines the feminine and the masculine in her paintings of women - and currently with an emphasis on the combination of women and football.

In recent years, Beth Mohr has created a series of works called "The Unseen", which depict women sitting on the toilet with their panties down around their heels. Or rather: You see the bottom of their legs, shoes or feet and their panties. The work was initiated by the artist's desire to focus on femininity and how women are in the world.
The inspiration for this series of paintings arose after an experience Beth Mohr had one evening on her way home by bicycle, passing a man standing and urinating by a tree. What if it had been a woman sitting there peeing, she thought... What would she have thought? Definitely different – something different anyway, and why?
Why do we think differently about women in the public space? Eg. also about a drunken woman versus a drunken man... According to all of us, what norms must the woman consciously or unconsciously live up to? What do women impose on themselves in terms of behavior and what social expectations are there of them?
Beth Mohr believes that there are still expectations that the woman is in control, that she behaves properly, follows certain norms and is in control of herself.
The panty paintings are called "The Unseen" because it is unseen, even unheard of, for women to sit down in public when they have to pee, and because women generally do not allow themselves to be seen in this intimate situation, and certainly not if they put a panty liner in their underpants. Beth Mohr reclaims everyday life for the women, demystifies their intimate situations and exposes them, vulnerable but real. This is how reality is - Take it or leave it!
The paintings expose more than what is actually shown on them, namely a hell-in-violence and norm-breaking femininity - it's "in your face", and it makes the viewer a little nervous.