Natasja Mabesoone: It Girls

Ariel sings. Yeah

Ursula swallows her voice. Yeah

Marilyn walks naked into the metaphor. Yeah

A girl draws the curtain. Puts her finger between the spre@ds. Yeah

The Plastics pose, then turn. A subtle nod to the parentheses in the back. Yeah

(idk check appendix)

In her exhibition It Girls , Natasja Mabesoone explores the representation of the female body as a site of artistic experimentation, using makeup as a transformative medium. Figures from Western pop culture such as Ariel, Ursula, Marilyn Monroe, the Mean Girls, appear in shifting forms. They are not merely portrayed as characters but staged as images: manifestations of a visual grammar through which Mabesoone interrogates femininity as a cultural construct - its aesthetics, its fetish, its surface.

 

These images are smeared, repeated, overprinted, stripped of their fixed, constructed form. Mabesoone uses repetition not to simplify, but to complicate, to emphasize the layered histories and appearances these figures carry. In their multiplicity, she reveals how representations are built up and distorted, probing their instability and resistance to fixed meaning.

 

 The It Girl is not approached here as an individual, but as a projection: an image shaped by pop and consumer culture, art history, and the mythology of girlhood. Like the Young-Girl in Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl , Mabesoone’s It Girl is not flesh and blood but a cultural position within the logic of late capitalism: both consumer and consumed, form and format. Rather than centring the idealized female body, It Girls focuses on how that body is constructed: technically, visually, and culturally. Mabesoone’s visual language doubles as a commentary on image culture itself, echoed in her choice of materials, traditionally coded as decorative or girlish: glitter, makeup, fake tattoos and nailpolish. The work becomes layered and tactile, undermining the gravitas of the painting canon. Mabesoone proposes a different way of looking and making: one that rejects hierarchy, embraces ephemerality, and winks back at the viewer.

 

monotype and a near-performative form of drawing. Many works bear the imprint of touch, a smeared lip, a finger, a smudge. Rather than taking the body as her subject, Mabesoone shifts our attention to the surface: the skin of the paper, the residue of makeup, the dot of the bitmap. As seen in the film Mean Girls (2004), teenage girls shape their identities through gossip, appearanceand social codes. The Plastics carefully curate their image to align with specific social groups. They design themselves as aesthetic projects, commodified selves.

 

Marilyn Monroe too appears, not as a one-dimensional icon, but as a figure charged with tension: between power and objectification, self-determination and myth-making. Mabesoone shows how such icons detach from their origins and continue to circulate as cultural constructs. In Ariel, the little mermaid who gives up her voice to be loved, Mabesoone finds a potent metaphor for the friction between desire and self-expression. Ariel trades language for legs, her voice for sexual appeal. Ursula, by contrast, weaponizes that voice and performs it. She embodies the threat of female autonomy: loud, flamboyant, unapologetic.

 

Another series references Drawing Room/The Living Room by the painter Balthus, whose oeuvre, frequently criticized for its sexualisation of young girls, Mabesoone finds controversial not only for its content, but for what it reveals about persistent power dynamics in art. Who gets to look, who is being looked at, and how themes like gender, age, and consent are handled under the guise of artistic genius.

 

Mabesoone’s work begins in ambiguity but never settles into binary oppositions. Her images hover between emergence and erasure, between meaning and distortion. The figures she portrays are neither heroines nor victims, but constructions - made, remade, and at times sabotaged. They return in a choreography of shifting significations: like eyeshadow in changing light, fluid forms of knowing, showing, and questioning.