“glove,” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/glove. Accessed 2/9/2023.

Glove in Art

Gloves have been a staple of personal protective equipment in almost all industries, from riding a horse, cooking, washing dishes, performing surgery, and conserving and handling valuable works of art in museums and galleries worldwide. There are many ways to use gloves; artists use them to work with a wide range of materials that could harm them: primers, resins, thinners, fiberglass, metal and anything that can put them in contact with an irritant or toxic material they may be allergic to. They have come a long way and have even been transformed for other uses besides human protection against outside elements. Today we can even observe gloves for digital drawing tablets. Why? Because when the oil produced by the human body accumulates on the screen, it can cause unresponsiveness from the device. Some models can be oversensitive to human touch, causing marks and strokes by having your palm touch the screen. And while we can see that gloves are essential and that we will continue to see new uses for them, some artists have taken it upon themselves to use this classic and vital product as inspiration and a point of departure in some of their work.

Meret Oppenheim

Oppenheim created a lot of unique sketches for gloves while studying arts in France. She created fur-covered gloves in 1934 and bone-structure-revealing gloves in 1936. (the same year as her famous fur-covered teacup, saucer, and spoon titled Object). The teenage artist was given the opportunity to make some money when the avant-garde design firm of Elsa Schiaparelli in Paris hired her to sketch gloves and jewels.

Bice Curiger, who is also the editor of the art magazine Parkett and is the biography of Oppenheim, collaborated with the artist ‘Gloves.’ The piece, which consists of 150 pairs of hand-stitched goat suede gloves that measure just over eight inches in length, was presented by Oppenheim the year she passed away. The prints for her design “Gloves” were first published in “Parkett” Magazine, No. 4, a contemporary art magazine, which also houses the gloves. The crimson veins in the screen print on the suede appear to turn the hands of individuals who will wear the delicate items inside out because of the contrast with the off-white suede.

Claire Watson

Claire Watson’s work spans over five decades and includes drawing, sculpture, and found-material mixed-media installations. Her most recent work is inspired by forms discovered in salvaged, deconstructed leather garments, and is an examination of the material and lyrical aspects of leather itself. The pieces are abstract reflections of the human form, interwoven with memories of human and animal existence, created with conventional sewing and self-taught tailoring skills.

In the series With Kid Gloves (2005-2007), Watson alters regular vintage gloves transforming their traditional look into something completely unconventional. Often drawing from humor and how we imagine, use, and play with our hands as children to a physical object. In Observation (2005), Claire plays with and brings to life the phrase thumb sucker, often used to describe children with the frowned upon the action of sucking their thumbs. She removes the human thumb altogether and replaces it with the human female breast with its corresponding nipple, a symbol of motherhood, nourishment for children, and overall, a symbol of female empowerment and physical liberty.

Ellen Greene

This body of work, titled “Ballad of the Tattooed Lady,” was first displayed in a solo show at Firecat Gallery in Chicago in 2011. This is a literal body of art in which each pair of gloves represents a feminine body and is embellished with a unique tattoo narrative. I like how the gloves and tattoos have different cultural implications. Ladies gloves are considered a high form of luxury fashion, but tattoos have historically been considered a harsh, low class, and masculine form of physical expression. This contradiction puts into question societal notions of male and feminine bodies, as well as how tattoo imagery reinforces those forms.

These gloves are all old, each one distinctive and often used. I don’t offer them as wearing fashion things, but rather as paintings on gloves. Magnets and steel inserts or custom-made shadow box frames hold them to the wall.

I love to shake up conventional associations people have with objects and ideas. Traditional American tattoos are made of up small glyphs that work as a shorthand to communicate basic human emotions. The heart, star, snake, dagger, pin-up, and skull are just some of the basic building blocks of this visual language. Jung called these blocks “archetypes” and wrote extensively on the effect these images and ideas have on our unconscious mind. Mixing the brave young soldier or the beautiful pin-up with words on banners that fall short of cultural ideals causes the viewer to question these ideals and their meanings.

Ellen Greene

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