Florine Demosthene’s artwork examines how black culture is commodified and fetishised. Through paintings and drawings, she seeks to magnify the subtlety of racial constructs and how viewers have become comfortable with derogatory images. Her most recent work, The Capture, delves into the subconscious mind of a black heroine and the ephemeral quality of her thoughts and experiences. These mixed media pieces, textual mélanges of ink, oil, graphite, and charcoal, depict voluptuous female figures amid a strange world of decay and destruction. Demosthene is intrigued by the black female body as an icon in contemporary imagery and how her physical size is supposed to dictate a certain set of ideals and behavior. The Capture is the initial phase of constructing a non-typical black female heroine persona and an attempt to structure a new mythology that explores black female sexuality and sensuality. View the entire series here.

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Florine Demosthene earned her BFA from Parsons the New School for Design and her MFA from Hunter College. She has shown extensively through group and solo exhibitions in London and in various cities in the USA. She was a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2011 and she was featured in the premiere issue of Arc. She is a 2012 Keyholder resident at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York. You can view her work at www.florinedemosthene.com.