Black Widow Dances in an Abandoned Theater — Print & Oil Painting

The proportion is extremely tall and the artist has spent the height on the roof. A shaft of light falls the entire length of the canvas from an opening in a domed ceiling, passing through a green stained rotunda, two galleries of arches and a great deal of hanging dust before it ever reaches a floor. The building is the subject and the figure is what the light happens to land on.

The colour is cold throughout. Cyan leads the measurement with blue second, and everything from the mould on the plaster to the standing water in the shadows sits in sea green and slate. The artist has given the damage as much attention as the architecture, which is unusual and is what makes the place read as genuinely abandoned rather than as a set.

She is small, centred and low in the frame, on the point of one foot with the other leg drawn up and one arm raised into the beam, holding the position with complete correctness. Long red hair is the only warm colour in the entire picture, and at this scale it amounts to a single mark.

The floor around her is rubble, and out of it stand pale shards driven upright into the dust at various angles. The artist has arranged them so that they radiate outward from the point she is standing on.

The dancing was installed rather than learned. The women who came out of that programme were issued with false biographies as part of the conditioning, and the standard one was a training with a famous Moscow company: an entire youth of classes, rehearsals and performances that never took place, fitted well enough that the woman carrying it could not tell. Whether this particular figure ever studied any of it is a question the comics have deliberately declined to settle. From our Marvel collection, alongside the same position seen wide across the auditorium and the same suit against an icy backdrop.