Maggie in pink

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, 2 Marsham Street

Maggie in Pink is a photograph of Maggie, the artist’s wife, dressed sumptuously in a silk kimono, clearly just for the pleasure of it, and for themselves – a sentiment emphasised by the defiant slogan on their handbag – ‘I didnt ask your opinion’. This is one of a number of photographs taken by the artist Rene Matić between 2018 and 2021 and brought together in a book titled Flags for Countries That Don’t Exist but Bodies That Do. The photographs are of Matić’s family, both by blood and those they have chosen to live with. As pointed out by artist Hannah Black who wrote the foreword for the book, it is the changing colour of Maggie’s hair that is the only visual marker of the passing of time in this book. What comes through in the everyday images of their life in this publication is what Matić describes as ‘this overwhelming sense of love, intimacy and community’. These images are in fact the way Matić lays claim to a Britain that had not readily offered them a place in society or, as the artist and writer Jamila Prowse describes them, as a love letter to their black, brown and queer community. 

With a mixed race father, who was shunned by the white side of his family and found refuge in a community of skinheads, Matić grew up in Britain with a sense of inherited displacement. The experience of being both mixed race and non-binary – ‘a queer, working class womxn of colour’, as they put it – set them at odds with large swathes of British society: ‘I like to describe my work as existing in a meeting place of ‘rude(ness)’ – a quality of “interrupting'' or existing “in between”,’ explains Matić, whose exploration of their own British identity, challenges Britain’s symbols and established ways of being, in some cases reclaiming sometimes uncomfortable aspects of these ways of being in order to live a life in Britain on their own terms. In one of their film works for example, a tattoo artist inks the words ‘Live British, Die British’ on their back a slogan associated with far right white skinheads, and which among other things speaks to the little-known history of skinheads emerging out of a ‘multicultural marriage of West Indians and the white working class’. Matić talks about ‘always looking for where I have come from’ and, for them, this series of photographs, of which Maggie in Pink is one, finally offers a view of that place.

Rene Matić is an artist, writer and poet born in Peterborough and based in London. Matić graduated with a BFA from Central St Martins in 2020 and works with photography, film and sculpture to explore their personal history, identity and the in-between spaces they inhabit within British society Their work is informed by ideas of glitch feminism and their experience of being a ‘mixed-race non-binary femme’ in Britain. Matić has shown their work in solo exhibitions, including at Kunstverign Gartenhaus, Vienna (2023), South London Gallery, London and Quench Gallery, Margate, UK (2022), Arcadia Missa, and VITRINE Gallery, London, UK (2021). Group exhibitions including Matić’s work have been held at the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry (2023); High Art, Arles, France (2022); Sadie Coles HQ, London (2022); Bold Tendencies, London (2021); with Bloomberg New Contemporaries at South London Gallery; and at Schlossmuseum, Linz, Austria (2020).

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

photograph (as object name), print (as object name), inkjet print

Artist

Rene Matić (1997 - )

Title

Maggie in pink

Date

2019

Medium

inkjet print

Dimensions

height: 39.6 cm; width: 26.9 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Arcadia Missa, with funds raised from print sales from the Robson Orr TenTen Award, a GAC/Outset Annual Commission, December 2021

Provenance

Arcadia Missa, London UK; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 3 December 2021

GAC number

19027