A Major Romance

Kilimnik’s mercurial practice over the past three decades foregrounds her insightful commentary on and nuanced devotion to popular culture. By the 1990s, when she made this drawing, she had cemented her reputation as a distinct and incisive voice in a generation of artists who combine various diverse strategies: the "scatter" installation, where found materials, often scavenged from thrift stores or the dumpster or sourced from the pages of fashion and gossip magazines, are assembled in tableaux; the painted fantasy—works in oil that often read as a pastiches of rococo or 19th-century romantic tropes; and dense, information-filled drawings that spell out and interweave her various fixations and obsessive references to movie stars, fashion models, and favorite television programs.

In this prime example of the latter, Kilimnik mixes her gossip-rag-like jargon with three portraits of actor Leonardo DiCaprio, then at the height of his early fame following the release of Titanic the year before this drawing was made. Central to Kilimnik’s narrative of the 1990s is also her devotion to the 1960s British spy drama The Avenger. At the bottom left she references an episode from Season 4 (1965)—the first of the series to be broadcast in the United States—where agents John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) experience a particularly hallucinatory visit to a Royal Air Force base following a car crash.