Rosa Loy’s paintings in “So Near and Yet So Far” at Kohn Gallery delineate a mysterious fairytale world desolately populated only by women. Initially, the women appear to be engaged in habitual activities such as farming or playing; but the more you look at them, the more an ambiguous sense of kookiness unfurls from their deceptively normal-looking settings. With old-fashioned hairstyles, simple clothing, and relatively generic miens, the Leipzig-based artist’s stoutly posed figures’ idealized appearances recall Communist propaganda painting; but surrealist elements burst the bubble of their Socialist Realism style. Many of Loy’s paintings feature two similar figures, one of which could represent the other’s imaginary friend or self-reflection; but it’s difficult to tell real from imagined, just as it’s difficult to tell exactly what the figures are supposed to be doing inside their dreamlike realms. Whatever they’re up to, they bear smug expressions, with sparkling eyes seeming to betray self-satisfied awareness that they’re engaged in something illicit. Or perhaps the joke is on the viewer whom they sometimes gaze at with impish smirks. Loy’s surreal elements often take on a decidedly sinister character, especially in Tulpenzwiebeln (2018, pictured above), where two nocturnally gardening girls are either planting or exhuming tulip bulbs appearing as evil fetuses. Loy paints with casein, giving her pictures’ surfaces a rich matteness matching their moody atmospheres. Muted washes somberly evoke gray Northern Europe days as well as the political ravages whose gloomy specter haunts the artist’s native East Germany even today. Collectively, Loy’s open-ended allegories seem to express the message that a little imagination can help one unbury intriguing possibilities from adversely circumscribed options.

Kohn Gallery
1227 N. Highland Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Show runs through Jan. 9