25.4 × 30.5 cm
(10 × 12 inches)
No. 452
In Cosmetics, Armstrong compresses an entire ruined city into a small and extraordinarily concentrated image. A classical statue survives upon its pedestal amid fractured buildings, while above it an enormous painted mouth smiles from the remains of a cosmetics advertisement.
The conjunction is characteristically unexpected. Antiquity and modern consumer culture occupy the same decaying landscape: the idealised human form of classical sculpture set against the manufactured seduction of the advertisement. The effect is at once witty, beautiful and faintly disturbing.
Armstrong repeatedly used fragments of the ancient world to make the present appear strange. Here both statue and advertisement have become remnants, surviving within a city whose normal life has disappeared. What initially looks almost whimsical gradually acquires a more unsettling implication, as different ideas of beauty, permanence and civilisation are brought together among the ruins.
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