Art show spotlights truth of female beauty

Polina Reisman’s “Lady in Red” is one of the artworks on view through April 1 in the Art Center -Highland Park exhibit “Beauty Imperfect.”

Updated: March 7, 2013 11:50AM

Perfection is a tough standard for anyone to contend with, yet the media-created standard of perfect feminine beauty is something women have to cope with all their lives.

Which is why the Highland Park Art Center is exhibiting “Beauty Imperfect” through April 1, featuring the work of North Shore artists Ronit Wiener, Polina Reisman and Joyce Marcus.

“It’s an important subject,” said Erin Saltsgaver, assistant to the director at the Art Center. “We’re bombarded constantly, all our lives, with idealized corporate and media-driven images of how women should look.

“The whole point of the show is to embrace the female form as it is, to remind us that any woman can be beautiful just as she is.”

More than a year in development, “Beauty Imperfect” is a collection of paintings and sculptures celebrating the beauty that runs deeper and truer than the false ideal perpetuated in movies, TV and advertising.

“I have sculptures in the show featuring women most people would call beautiful and women who would probably not be considered beautiful by today’s standards,” Marcus said. “But I think they’re all beautiful in their way. I have one piece in the show featuring a woman who is very overweight and it’s my favorite. She has a very peaceful look on her face that shows she accepts herself. She’s happy with her size. She’s content. And that’s beautiful.”

Marcus added that her concept of beauty is similar to the poet Keats, who wrote in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that beauty is truth. “I believe that beauty is truth because truth, by definition, is reality,” she explained. “And in reality, no one is perfect.”

“That’s what this exhibition is about,” said Wiener, “We wanted to create a show that celebrates the beauty of women of all ages, shapes and sizes.

“I’m 44 years old; I can’t look 24 years old again. I could try to make myself look younger, but still, I am who I am.”

Wiener noted that one of her paintings depicts a woman with perfect skin “yet she’s about to have plastic surgery and you can see what the surgeon has written and drawn all over her face, showing what he’s about to do to her.

“Why are we trying to appear ageless?” she asked. “I say flaws are beauty. It all comes down to acceptance of self.”

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