Using images sourced from fashion and interior magazines, Belgian artist Cris Brodahl creates photorealist oil collages of fractured yet eerily empowered femininity. Rendered primarily in sepia tones, the paintings give the effect of Edward Steichen-esque fashion photos that have been chopped up and given life anew as elegantly surreal nightmares. Playing with the sensuality of vintage fashion iconography — a patrician profile and voluminous bob here, a Marlene Dietrich suit, high arched brow, and flirty bare shoulder there — the artist accouters her girls in things like pierrot collars made of skulls and blows their delicate faces out with expanses of sky, images of tree branches, loopy swirls of flaxen hair, and displaced anatomy. The results are sometimes grotesque (as a woman with a ring box in lieu of an eye, or an owl face are wont to be), yet glamorous in their decay. More images after the jump.– Marlo Kronberg
