There’s a stark division within Ruby Dickson’s canvases. Her images split her subject around the eyes, an act of disrupting the gaze – both what we look at, and what looks back at us – severing mind and body. As you stare at these paintings, immaculate recreations of photographs, featuring head-to-toe haute couture, and get the sense that there’s something far-off and distant about the figure staring back at you.
That figure is Kim Kardashian, a public figure who seemingly needs very little introduction. But Dickson’s paintings of her, which recreate images of Kim snapped by the paparazzi – turn this recognisable figure on her head.
Ruby Dickson’s Kim Kardashian paintings
One of Kardashian’s most famous fashion moments comes from the 2021 Met Gala, in which she wore an all-black Balenciaga outfit that covered her completely from head to toe, cloaking her face and body, as if she had come from, or embodied, some kind of dark void. In Dickson’s paintings, Kardashian seems to be emerging out from this same void, as if she is at the centre of some strange black hole. Through Dickson’s selection of images, we see how ingrained Kim K is into pop culture and collective consciousness; there are references to Birkin Bags, Balenciaga, and Saturday Night Live. But through all of this, it’s Kardashian herself that reigns supreme – one caption even mentions Kourtney who, of course, doesn’t appear in Dickson’s image.
What’s so striking about Dickson’s work is the level of detail and care she offers to her subject. It’s tempting to treat someone like Kim Kardashian as a kind of cultural punchline, but through these recreations – which capture her outfits in painstaking detail, animating the texture of fur coats and snakeskin – the artist instead treats her subject with a degree of care that feels rare within the maelstrom of celebrity culture, something that the title of the exhibition – ‘Maybe my fairy-tale has a different ending than I dreamed it would. But that’s OK’, currently at London’s Nicoletti gallery – also acknowledges. Between this and Dickson’s decision to base both her paintings and captions on paparazzi images of Kardashian, she understands the strangeness of celebrity culture – its ubiquity in contemporary life and the hollowness that seems to be embedded in it, whether you’re in the eye of the storm, or just on the outside gazing at it.
It’s through this attention to detail that a surprising parallel emerges with Dickson’s work: the court paintings that once immortalised royalty centuries ago. With the multi-hyphenate last-name combination of Kardashian-Jenner-West that captures Kim and her sprawling family, the celebrity and her kind would fit perfectly alongside a house like Saxe-Coburg-Gothe. While it feels like an oversimplification to say that celebrity culture has replaced institutions like monarchies in the eyes of the public, Dickson’s art is able to reveal how ideas of celebrity and visibility have evolved with time, and what it means for art to keep up with them. It gives a certain irony to the fact that, in every one of Dickson’s images, Kardashian is wearing sunglasses. This offers yet another challenge to the gaze, an uncertainty of what looks back at us even as we find ourselves unable to look away from it.
'Maybe my fairy-tale has a different ending than I dreamed it would. But that’s OK' is at Nicoletti gallery, London until 23 March 2024
