the venus cycle

Reinventing Venus:
A Collaboration with Jenny Tango

The Venus Cycle explores the reality of the older woman’s body, un-idealized and imprinted with life’s experiences, Society’s emphasis on female beauty as youthful and slender belies what women see when they look in the mirror and discounts the grace and strength of older women’s bodies. With a brazen acceptance, Grabel normalizes the changing seasons of the female form.

These mixed-media constructions consist of Susan Grabel’s aging women’s torsos, cast in paper, some cut open, some layered, some incomplete, and Jenny Tango’s drawings in paint using different glimpses and views of an aging woman’s body. Through repetition, the aging woman’s body is normalized and brought into the artistic canon.