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Statuesque Amy and her new BF
Nick Curtis, Evening Standard15 May 2008
Usually, you can't get Amy Winehouse out of the pub. Now, it seems, you can't get her out of the art gallery.
Onlymonths after the hard-living singer was immortalised with husband Blake Fielder-Civil in a £1,175 print called The Kiss by artist Gerald Laing, she is the subject of two new artworks in a major London exhibition.
Sculptor Guy Portelli shows her dressed like a Fifties burlesque dancer astride a broken champagne bottle, back arched and beehive rampant, a cigarette in one hand and a wine glass in the other. The work is called, predictably enough, Excess.
The dimensions of the statuette are based on a Methuselah of champagne, the equivalent of eight bottles, or a typical Winehouse night out. Portelli said: "I would never make a sculpture of someone I didn't respect."
The exhibition also includes Celebrity 1 by art student Charlotte Suckling, an image of Winehouse smoking a cigarette superimposed on a collage of newspaper pictures. Meanwhile, the singer has enjoyed a second night out with Babyshambles frontman Pete Doherty. Having already been seen out together after Doherty's postprison gig earlier in the week, the two musicians left Winehouse's Camden home in the early hours, with Doherty sporting a Michael Jackson-style face mask. Their outing came the day after Winehouse's spokesman said that police will not be taking any action over video footage apparently showing the singer smoking crack.
