11/12/2003:
Ingrid Loxterkamp's work will upset some people. These lush and arresting paintings of young girls in skimpy, 'grown-up' outfits and full make-up, striking coquettish, precociously adult poses might seem like a deliberate attempt to shock, or even a straight forward incitement to voyeurism.

Loxterkamp describes her works in rather different terms, emphasising the way it draws on and examines images that already circulate in advertising and mass media with its cult of youth and habit of sexualising everything from ice cream to insurance. Representations and perceptions of childhood are changing, and, says Loxterkamp, 'little girls develop a precocious awareness of their bodies and the gaze they attract' under the pressure of the media's images.

Loxterkamp's work explores this complex and sensitive area with a style of painting as contradictory as its subject, highly controlled brushwork juxtaposed with thick and crude swathes of paint, innocent pastel patterns colliding with the leopard skin decor of more adult playrooms. The costumes and uniforms of adulthood and childhood are shown to overlap, as if the distinction between them had been lost.
Ingrid Loxterkamp   Sophie In Too Much Lipstick   2003
Oil and glitter on canvas   18x26 inches  £970 / $1520
Elements of the disco, the gym and the teenage bedroom mingle in the habitat of these somehow grotesque little girls. 'The child-woman is now omnipresent in western culture' says Loxterkamp. This figure is a cocktail of innocence and premature knowledge, a confusion between a yearning for purity and a taste for transgression on the part of the adult image makers.

These pictures bravely, dexterously play with these charged, ambiguous representations, using a richly sensuous style to pursue a critical and indeed moral curiosity. Loxterkamp's work reminds us that art should sometimes explore areas officially 'out of bounds', as she questions the unacknowledged desires and drives that 'normal' society exploits but would prefer not to mention.
Selected Comments:

This is what Jon Benet would have looked like if
"some Puerto Rican guy" hadn't killed her.
- King Chicken

This is amazing stuff with a powerful message behind it,
it's bold and shocks one into questioning societal values two thumbs up
- Anon.

It's fun to exploit little girls for greed, yay America!
- Bet she doesn't have a daughter

Of course it's porn!
We are soaking in it Madge
Let the children play
- Haikuku

Air brush me some wisdom...
this is art and its a sad thing if you cant see that.
-you make me sick-

Hot Stuff!!
- Humbert Humbert

Too many words,
pictures like a hangover, dull, impounding, uncomfortable.
- go see a tree

I want to slip my little fireman between her fat lips.
- Michael J.

...that reminds me of the time i saw a kid like that in the
mall and compared her to a 40 year old woman in a 10 year old's body and her mom was standing behind me and started roaring at me like a wounded water buffalo.
- ice queen
PORNOGRAPHY!

(39 Votes- 33% Art, 67% Porn)


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