Reba Maybury

Reba Maybury (born 1990), is a British-Pakistani artist, writer, lecturer, and dominatrix, sometimes known as Mistress Rebecca. Maybury’s work has garnered international attention for the ways in which it deconstructs the economic-capitalist underpinnings of both sex work and the commercial art world. Maybury has exhibited internationally and describes men as her medium, reflecting that much of her artwork is made by her male submissives through her control and direction.

Early life and education

Maybury was born in Oxford in 1990 to a Pakistani mother and a Welsh father and has a younger sister. She graduated in Fashion History and Theory in 2013 at the faculty of arts and design Central Saint Martins in London.

Artistic Practice

A central focus of Maybury’s artistic practice is the tension between the power she wields as a dominatrix and the gendered dynamics of such an interaction between men and women, as in the case of sex work. In subjecting her male submissives to such menial tasks of labour (for instance, drawing the cover art for a show in pencil), Maybury transforms her position as an object of fantasy in men’s eyes into a tangible power over them.

In 2018 Maybury gained widespread unwanted attention when a tabloid reported on her apparent ‘political re-education’ of her typically conservative submissives; Maybury has written not only about the hypocrisy of such submissives who find themselves sexually attracted to dominant women yet deny their rights outside of session, but also the vitriolic reaction and hateful abuse she suffered in the right-wing press because of it. She writes, “Sex is about play and I want to play with politics too.” This has earned her the moniker of ‘political dominatrix’.

Her work has drawn comparison with Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous compositions of sex workers, often captured in moments of repose between their acts of sexual labour. Maybury’s configuration is far more provocative, however, as here men – the clients – are the ones made to work on these as paint-by-number kits, the final product then given to Maybury as her property.

Ugelvig describes how Maybury’s ‘Used Men’ series (2021) depicts the clothes of a presumably naked male submissive, an image we are left to imagine for ourselves, strewn across the floor of the gallery space, “safely re-branded as artwork”. Though Maybury’s submissives are in fact her mutual, consenting collaborators, the joke is very much on them and, in a spirit of reactionary feminism, they do not receive credit. Maybury, then, simultaneously lampoons stereotypes about the art world whilst illuminating the discontinuous imbalances of power in sex work. This approach is arguably materialist in nature, stressing the labour at play in any such interactions, both visible and invisible.

She teaches a class on critical thinking through Central Saint Martins’ MA Fashion course and has previously taught at HEAD, Geneva, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, University of Applied Arts Vienna and Copenhagen Art Academy, Sculpture School.

Exhibitions

Solo/duo exhibitions

From Paris With Love: The Book, Tiny Mutual Admiration Societies, Vienna, 2024

From Paris With Love, Treize, Paris, 2022

Faster than an erection, Museum of Contemporary Art (MACRO), Rome, 2021

Moralists at a Costume Party, Huset for Kunst og Design, Holstebro, Denmark, 2021

A-good-individual, schwarzescafé LUMA Westbau, Zürich, 2019

My Deep Secret (with Will Sheldon), Arcadia Missa, London, 2018

Fish Wives (with Claire Barrow), Paramount Ranch (with Shoot The Lobster), United States, 2016

Group exhibitions

SexKino Roland, NEXPO, Zürich, 2022

In the Company of, Eden Eden Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, 2022

The Puppet Show, Centre d’art Contemporain, Geneva, 2022

Isabella, Associazione Barriera, Turin, 2022

The Baroness, Mimosa House, London, 2022

sub/dominium curated by SoiL Thornton, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, 2021

Put A Sock In It!, Sophie Tappinier, Vienna, 2021

Exhibition For Your Apartment, Dawid Radziszewski Gallery, Warsaw, 2021

In Excess, 3hD, Power Play, Berlin, 2021

Witchhunt, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2020

The Monstrous Bouquet, Omstand, Arnhem, 2020

Do You Love Me?, P.P.O.W, New York, 2019

Paint, Also Known as Blood, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2019

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker, ICA, London, 2019

Putting Out, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, 2018

Prick Up Your Ears!, Karma International, Los Angeles, 2018

Hardcore, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2023

Bibliography

From Paris with Love, Wet Satin Press, 2024

Faster than an erection, with a poem by Cassandra Troyan, Wet Satin Press and MACRO, 2021

BINTS! A Conversation Between Mistress Rebecca and the Elysium Harvester, Wet Satin Press, 2019

Dining with Humpty Dumpty, Wet Satin Press, 2017 and Arcadia Missa, 2019

The Goddess and the Worm, Wet Satin Press, 2015

== References ==