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Overview
In the late 1960s Jan Nigro started her ‘Encounters’ series. These drawings and paintings are extreme close-ups of women’s bodies, focussing in on skin, slick, and the promise of touch. Nigro used different techniques to heighten our sense of the skin’s surface – rubbed pencil, or dotted flicked paint suggest the friction of pores, hairs and sweat.
Nigro's 1960s and 1970s work often addressed feminist and sexual politics. The 'Encounter' series was originally inspired by watching a man look at neo-classical marble statues in Rotorua:
The pristine Italian marble ladies posing in the foyer of Tudor Towers became subjects, and once while there, I observed a short black-suited man admiring them. He was caught, later, peering through a crack in the door at real ladies wallowing, pink and nude, in the medicinal waters of the Bath House – the incident surfaced in my Encounter series of the ‘70s.
(Jan Nigro, Apple for Teacher, p. 63)