The Queen Series: Madonna

In “The Queen Series: Madonna,” Devin Miles creates a multi-layered monument to the pop icon – as a ruler over style, self-assertion and cultural attribution. Madonna appears frontally, wearing a crown and a spiked necklace, staged against a flat orange that oscillates between street art and sacred glow. The underlying portrait is closely related to the motif that street artist Thierry Guetta, alias Mr. Brainwash, used for Madonna’s album “Celebration” – an iconic image that has long since detached itself from the original photo shoot and become legible as a collective sign. In the background of Miles’ work runs a fragmented, dripping field of lettering that yields no clear song quotations but isolates individual key words. These words read like graffiti slogans and condense central themes of Madonna’s work – individuality, community, independence, desire and projection. Devin Miles creates a pictorial surface on which pop history, self-myth and social legibility overlap. Madonna appears as a figure of transition: between art and commerce, power and vulnerability, icon and human being.