Blue of

Blue Of bears witness to a moment in the early 1990s when Mira Schor reintroduced the representation of language as image. This reappropriation of pictorial text is directly rooted in the political and military events of the time. Blue Of belongs to a group of four works entitled Area of Denial (1992), an expression from the US military vocabulary referring to areas rendered uninhabitable, deprived of oxygen, following chemical attacks, in order to prevent enemy occupation. Schor finds this expression particularly poignant: “Because so many things are areas of denial: the body, its contingency and mortality, as well as the body of painting itself.” 

The word “of” is enclosed within the representation of female genitalia, establishing a direct link between language, the body, and power. Schor's works thus deploy a continuum between the intimate and the political: the mechanisms of sexual domination and the logic of geopolitical confrontation appear to belong to the same system of control, denial, and symbolic violence.

This work is held by the Pinault Collection and was presented for the first time at the "Corps et âmes" exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce in 2025.