View the Gallery: (9 photos)
Although the online reviews aren't pretty for Club Madonna, a strip joint in Miami Beach, a crowd of beautiful people overflowed onto the sidewalk trying to gain entry into artist Ryan McGinness' "Women: The Blacklight Paintings" event. The nude club hypes itself as "simply sinful," and for some art world patrons, the sight of women taking it all off was too much for their tender eyes -- causing them to exit faster than they entered. The dancers, however, weren't the main attraction in the club last night. So while the MC announced "two for one lap dances" and beckoned Christina to stand by for the main stage and Maria to take stage two, art world cognoscenti -- including photographer Spencer Tunick (famous for his urban installations of nudes), Studio Museum in Harlem curator Naomi Beckwith and the artist collective FriendsWithYou -- checked out the exhibition of McGinness blacklight paintings and projections.
The four large paintings decorating the walls of the club layered McGinness's distillations of nude women into universal symbols in a variety of silk-screened colors, while the two looping slideshows presented the rough, abstract, preliminary drawings of a multitude of sitters -- made in his studio in New York and during the past few days at the club. "Working from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. everyday, I've made about 40 sketches of the dancers," McGinness told us last night. "Right now I'm just collecting raw data. Back in the studio, I'll refine the drawings with mechanical tools to turn them into universal symbols."
Adding to the night's event, the artist airbrushed four of the dancers, one for each stage, with florescent paints and installed blacklights to heighten the experience. "I broke down the body into five sections, the two arms, the torso, and two legs," the artist explained, "and each section gets a separate color." When the dancers finally took the stages, it was an amazing sight -- not quite as refined as the Cirque de Soleil, but remarkably better than the usual strip club fare.
