Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Switzerland

Exhibited:
Taipei, Eslite Gallery, No-Mad-Ness In No Mans Land, 2013

17th Biennale of Sydney, Artspace Gallery, The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, 2010

"The title of the piece is borrowed from the entrance sign of a perfume shop in a touristy area of Cairo and collaged onto the front of a house- a wannabe Chateau de Versailles- enthroned in the center of a manicured garden. The bucolic scene, reminiscent of baroque art, with its profusion of symbolic iconography and composition, is filled with the many levels and forms used across cultures to represent paradise. Here, my mother represents the womb, the original Arcadia. She becomes, as do all the other elements in Perfumes & Bazaar, The Garden of Allah, one of the many prisms through which we imagine paradise: paradise as a social construct.

In the first years of the twenty-first century, the world was experiencing a certain kind of invasion: "made in China" was at its peak. Egypt and the rest of the world seemed to be flooded with plastic flowers; gold plastic frames; 3-D plastic representations of Jesus, Mecca, and the Hindu gods; and waterfalls that appeared to move. This caricatured paradise was everywhere I looked, especially in Egypt and other African countries, prompting me to explore this iconography. The Chateau de Versailles may be seen as the ultimate kitsch, a theatrical tour de force of excess, wealth, and abundance. The ruling monarchy in Egypt once imitated the luxury of French courtly life and advertised its grandeur to the greater public". - Lara Baladi

Lara Baladi's vibrant, phantasmic and monumental mixed media works have established her as one of the Middle Easts most accomplished contemporary artists. Through a complex amalgam of myth, symbolism and autobiographical referencing, Baladi depicts brilliant and vivid landscapes reminiscent of the allegorical masterpieces of Hieronymus Bosch and Bruegel the Elder. The present work is a rich and striking example of Baladi at her imaginative best.

Baladi's works can be found in a number of institutional and private collections including Fondation LVMH, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Qatar), Bulgari (Italy), Chase Collection (New York), Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain (Paris), Kamel Lazaar Foundation (Tunisia), Pori Museum (Finland), among others.