VICTORIA MYERS

As a child, I loved movies about actresses like the 1937 film Stage Door, about a group of aspiring actresses at a theatrical boarding house for women in New York City. I thought the women, with all of their fast-talk and tribulations, seemed the height of glamour. Watching the film again as an adult, I saw that, even in the movie, nothing was uncomplicated and without contradiction.

OLIVIA COLE

The arresting title of Nina Mae Fowler’s new composite drawing comes from Marlene Dietrich’s disparaging remark about her contemporary, the famously devout all-American beauty Loretta Young. “Every time she sins, she builds a church. That’s why there are so many Catholic churches in Hollywood…” is her insult in full.

DR MARGHERITA SPRIO

Memories of movies are written within all of us that exist within a mediated world, they circulate around and within us and help to give us a sense of ourselves. The imaginary world that is constructed through half-remembered film sequences gives us the vocabulary to understand the important role that cinema has played in our emotional landscape. The drawings by Nina Mae Fowler are to be seen within this context of the imaginary realm.

CASSIE BEADLE

Fowler’s series explores the concept of ‘conditional love’ through the experiences of the children of Hollywood superstars. Some of the daughters in this series have written condemnatory accounts of their childhoods – exposing their mothers as abusive, alcoholic and violent figures whose anodyne public image was the opposite of the truth. The detail and small scale of the drawings, coupled with the lamplight, lend the work a quiet and contemplative intimacy, contradicting the well-documented, fractious relationships between the mothers and daughters depicted.

CHARLOTTE MARTIN

Intrigued by the emotional excessiveness of a scene from The Bad and the Beautiful, in which a distraught and hysterical Lana Turner flees in a car from a lover who has just betrayed her, Fowler started to work. It is her process here that deserves particular attention. Fowler takes every frame of the scene and watches them through incessantly, taking note of minute differences, rewinding, skipping forward, eventually stitching together her own vision of Turner; a potent and immediately arresting one.

Anisha Birk

Bull Fever (2011) consists of two portraits drawn in pencil and graphite, each encircled by a sculpted frame. The work fuses Fowler’s practices as both trained sculptor and draftsman. The resin frame extends the flat two-dimensional object into the space of the viewer stood before it. In this process, the artwork strays across the independent and related relationships between sculpture and drawing, asking how the apparently separate disciplines can meet and react.

JESSICA PUREFOY

In this body of work, Fowler explores the fine line between dominance and subservience, strength and fragility — the tension between outer appearance and inner struggle that her previous work has also touched upon. In fact, this body of work feels like the climax towards which her years of interest in these themes have been leading.

ANISHA BIRK

Many elements of Nina Mae Fowler’s expressive mode, her distinctive visual language, are found gathered together here. The figures — ghostly, poised and impressive — move against a deep black surface. Fowler signals the ‘found’ nature of the images by using an already established language of visual rhetoric: her characters contort, embrace and arabesque in a manner that assumes much of the substance of early motion picture and bespeaks the form of classical ballet.

ANISHA BIRK

A Real Allegory (2011) consists of two parts, Part I, Male and Part II, Marlene. Both are vast graphite and pencil drawings with a sculptural component. In Part I, Male, Fowler draws from a photographic still of the 1934 Pre-code film The Search for Beauty.1 The scene features a locker room, which forms the backdrop of the piece. Onto the backdrop she collages sourced material alongside original images from the film. To the left of the drawing, Clark Gable is a boxer lying on the floor while the matador Manolete lays embalmed on a bed.

DAVID ANDERSON

At the centre of Fowler’s new show at the The Cob Gallery, London, are her life-size ‘leaning boards’ — reconstructions of the off-screen props on which film-starlets would rest between takes, in order to relax without crumpling their dresses. Forgotten today and overlooked in their time, these boards seemed to exist in a perpetual state of poise between their own mundanely mechanical weight and the supposed lightness of the stardust they supported.

BARRY MILES

Nina’s subject is fame and its underside: the artificial construct of Hollywood glamour, the tawdry attraction of Tinseltown in contrast to the inner lives of the stars: their personal torments and demons, traumas and tragedies. Her subjects have ranged from Elvis Presley to bullfighters, crooners to tabloid celebrities, but most of all it is the stars of early Hollywood that have fascinated her; all areas where the individual is accorded an iconic presence that often bears little resemblance to the real person beneath, also areas where the public have a prurient interest in their fall from grace.

ALISSA BENNETT

Artist Nina Mae Fowler reminds us that there has always been a cannibalistic bent to our interest in celebrity. A sumptuously rendered still of Judy Garland seems to document a moment when the entertainer has momentarily dropped her performance, her face registering the full impact of the pain wrought by a lifetime of public scrutiny. Juxtaposing an image of a young and coquettishly stripped-down Marilyn Monroe with the infamous snapshot of Whitney Houston’s bathroom-cum-drug den, Fowler intimates a ‘choose your own adventure’ story that inevitably terminates in the mortuary.

AUSTIN MUTTI-MEWSE

There were those who longed for fame but didn’t make it. Those who made it and lost it – failed marriages, faltered careers and false friends. There were platinum blondes and raven-haired goddesses who died before the wrinkles and lines of which Hollywood lived in fear had a chance to set in to their Venus-like faces... and there was Frances Farmer.

HER HONOUR JUDGE MAUREEN BACON Q.C.

That’s no rapture to the power of greater good but my reaction on seeing the first of Nina Mae Fowler’s Love drawings with that sly male hand lying on a female neck. To me, a picture not so much about love, more the absence of it. In a summer where scenes besieged the media of a male politician’s hand placed on a female protester’s neck, ejecting her from a gathering of the elite, I wondered if, somehow, that shocking image still endured; that some ghastly imprint lingered on beneath the surface of my memory.

EVA WISEMAN

“You want to stop that movement from the popcorn to the mouth. Get people to stop chewing.” Nina sent me a quote from Marlon Brando. “The truth will do that.” Her newest work is an installation, where we emerge through a tunnel into a wet room, where Brando prepares for the scene where he’ll shout ‘Stella’ in A Streetcar Named Desire. We stop then, alone with him showering, and as well as awe and admiration, inevitably many of us will feel uneasy.

CHARLOTTE MARTIN

Manicured almond nails. Diamonds glinting in the turn of the light. Slicked pin curls. Spaghetti coiling into a lipsticked mouth from on high… Fowler has again created a subversive montage, snagging on our expected depiction of these icons. Her oeuvre is littered with explorations of the overlap between the public and private spheres and what the navigations of these realms by celebrity and fan alike can reveal of our cultural story.

DAME MARINA WARNER

Luminary is a perfect word to describe Nina Mae Fowler’s sequence of film directors’ portraits. Her subjects are leading lights who aren’t very often in the spotlight, but stay behind the scenes: esteemed film directors, several of them cult idols of the industry, they represent its variety and range – thrillers, animation, documentary, political drama, blockbusters, noir.

CHARLOTTE MARTIN

The FBI’s treatment of Seberg is integral to an understanding of Fowler’s drawings here. Fowler has long been fascinated by the relationship between celebrity and ‘gossip’, a symbiotic and evolving relationship that always seems to represent the prevailing ideals and morals of the day. Gossip is unrivalled in its ability to create and reframe a narrative so simply.