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Tag: figure painting
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GALLERY ROUNDS: Ilana Savdie
Kohn GalleryIlana Savdie’s first solo show with Kohn Gallery comprises 13 canvases and nine works on paper. Savdie uses vivid color, structure and composition to explore ideas of a liquid world as a metaphor to an ever-changing identity.
The title of the exhibit “Entrañadas” translates as “innards” in English. It is the interior or what is within that is the focus of this new body of work. As a queer artist, Savdie is interested in the idea of shapeshifting as a means to explore her identity. This is where the idea and concept of “fluidity” or liquid, come into play. Throughout the new series, the composition is chaotic with acidic bright neon colors and shapes that morph into body parts and figures as they intertwine with one another, establishing and collapsing shapes within each canvas.
Ilana Savdie, Falsos Positivos, 2021 In the painting Queen Breeders (2021), Savdie portrays two hooded faceless figures with other recognizable objects appearing, including the Marimonda mask—a folkloric symbol from the artist’s native Colombia—employed to mock the oppressive elite. The painting is a statement between the migratory nature of Savdie’s life and the flexibility of her identity. In Falso Positivos (2021), talons and police body armor make their appearance as part of a contemplation of the current sociopolitical condition. The liquid world of identity and gender dominate the paintings of Savdie. Not “fitting in” to a certain ideal is to become shapeless, thus the melding forms in the painting.
The opposing natures of the solid and fluid are pivotal in understanding Savdie’s work. In the mid-20th century, Surrealists such as Dali, Ernst and Tanguy used the biomorph to explore the unconscious and dreams. Savdie’s painting uses it as a means to investigate queer identity, migration and the current zeitgeist. In Ilana Savdie’s “Entrañadas” the works flows to an assertion of being real—both inside and out.
Ilana Savdie: Entrañadas
November 6 – January 29, 2022
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Deborah Brown
It’s difficult for paintings of female nudes in bucolic landscapes to transcend historic tropes of voyeuristic escapism, but Deborah Brown succeeds in positing hers as self-reflective meditations on contemporary femininity. The 11 paintings in her show at The Lodge set forth a dream world inhabited only by a woman, canines and a canoe. Together these scenes expound a loosely sequential imaginary narrative of exploration and motion whereby the lone protagonist, who stands in for the artist, sets off in her canoe, paddles across a lake, traverses a beach and finally arrives at a magical garden in Danae and Zeus (2018, pictured above). Brown’s rapid wet-on-wet brushwork conveys a soft, blurry dreaminess; her idyllic settings evoke Maxfield Parrish and early California plein-air; and her subjects reference bather paintings and Greek mythology. Yet there are undertones of precariousness. Dramatic interplay between light and shadow intimates a sense of foreboding expounded by the presence of the dogs, which seem to act as guards as well as companions in works such as Tiptoe (2019). With no one to leeringly appraise her, the woman’s nudity bespeaks freedom; but there is also vulnerability in her aloneness. In the final painting, Narcissus (2019), she gazes into a murky pool, perhaps reflecting on the distance she has traveled, the effort of her journey, and what might lie ahead. Here we most clearly apprehend her face; but her body slightly overbrims its outlines, as though she were still coming into being, or perhaps dissolving.
The Lodge
1024 N. Western Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90029
Show runs through Oct. 26 -
Orkideh Torabi
Orkideh Torabi’s painted burlesques of men offer sardonic commentary on patriarchal oppression of women in Iran and beyond. The Tehran-born, Chicago-based artist’s 2017 LA show featured mostly frontal portraits of caricatural men whose stark, formal poses against Persian patterns heightened their appearances of self-satisfied foolishness. Her new paintings build on the previous with added humor and intricacy, depicting full-length male figures in pairs or groups engaging in activities from which women are excluded. The title of her show, “Give them all they want,” suggests the liberty granted uniquely to men in Iran, where laws and customs restrict or prohibit women from partaking in many pastimes. Thus it’s always boys’ day out for Torabi’s protagonists, who frolic at leisure with not a care in the world, not a woman in sight. Reversing their ascendancy, Torabi bestows her characters with ruddy doll cheeks, aggrandized proboscises and terrible teeth that amplify their hilarious appearance as they revert to juvenility in playing with rubber ducks, gossiping like teenagers, and running around barely clothed. The absence of women is filled by the gents’ own femininity; for instance, the reclining pilgarlic in Wanna Join? (2019, pictured above) nonchalantly flaunts his girlish posterior remarkably well-suited to his striped skintight miniskirt. Highlighting the absurdity of entitlement based on one’s sex, Torabi’s comical paintings deliver a serious message: perhaps these delicate men’s urge to dominate women stems partly from their own insecurity. Fewer rights for women means fewer competitors.
Richard Heller Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave. #B-5A
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Show runs through Aug. 10 -
Heidi Hahn
Heidi Hahn‘s grandly scaled paintings lend iconic status to plain-Jane women going about quotidian routines. Breezily limned in free-flowing brushstrokes and translucent washes, her anonymous characters appear lost in dreamy, meditative worlds even as they shop, sweep, picnic and scroll through their smartphones. In contrast to society’s usual preoccupation with women’s appearance, Hahn de-emphasizes her subjects’ physicality, leaving their identities generic in favor of accentuating states of mind. Obscurely rendered in moody, multilayered transparencies, the women in paintings such as Burn Out in Shredded Heaven 10 (2018-19) appear as specters inhabiting liminal realms where daydreams overlay dull realities. It’s difficult to determine exactly what Hahn’s figures are doing, or where they are; yet they exude potent emotion. In Burn Out in Shredded Heaven 6 (2018-19, pictured above), a girl leans on her broom during a pensive moment in the middle of sweeping a floor. Her short white garment could be a lab coat, janitorial smock or nightshirt. Is she a scientist, a maid, or a girl tidying up her house? It matters not, for this idle moment stolen from spring-cleaning drudgery now belongs to her—who could stand for anyone.
Kohn Gallery
1227 North Highland Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Show runs through May 23 -
Sarah Wilson
In a world where robots gauge workers’ bathroom breaks, attending to one’s basic needs is seen as an indulgence. Current buzz around “self-care,” a notion often shrouded in a mystical feel-good aura as though it were elusive as a rainbow, attests the dysfunctionality of a society where everyday life has become so toilsome that maintaining one’s wellness seems a luxury. Addressing such issues with morbid satire, Sarah Wilson‘s first solo exhibition, “Self-Careless” at East Hollywood Fine Art, evokes surreal stresses of contemporary living. Four paintings feature an anomic female protagonist who lounges in dishabille about her domicile, donning sheet masks, chain-smoking, and contemplating her own mortality with only a sickly dog and swirling ghastly hallucinations for company. In Mouthfeel (2019, pictured above), she flosses her teeth while a disembodied arm emerges from a larger vision and coats her lashes with mascara even as her eyeball pops out. Suggesting a sleep paralysis dream induced by compulsively punching away on the internet, Shitpost (2019) stars a smartphone-wielding humanoid whose face sprouts a monstrous arm holding yet another phone for enhanced posting capabilities. Complementing these paintings are several sculptures, including Waiting Room (2018), a functional lamp whose ceramic base simulates body parts strung like beads alongside old tires. Augmenting the playful sense of apprehension, a bevy of grossly oversized multicolored cigarettes and a mammoth denim chair evoke the imminent presence of some insalubrious giant that might return any minute and put us mere mortals in our self-careless places.
East Hollywood Fine Art
4316 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90029
Show runs through May 18
Limited hours; see gallery website for details -
Christina Quarles
Via distortion and exaggeration, Christina Quarles strips figures to their essence, exposing aspects of the human condition in the raw. Recalling Francis Bacon with a more hopeful, feminine twist, the large-scale paintings in Quarles’ Regen Projects show, “But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same,” portray gymnastically contorted figures melting, seeping and protruding into one another and their surroundings, often appearing engaged in carnal activities of indeterminate nature. In paintings such as Bless tha Nightn’gale (2019, pictured above), gesture and corporeal substance are so jumbled that it’s difficult to tell where one subject ends and where another begins. Severed and reattached limbs twist and turn like snakes; elongated digits writhe like worms. Deformed bodies lack key elements such as heads and are often denuded to bare muscle or bone. Such grotesquerie is counterpointed by the exuberant prettiness of Quarles’ cheery palette, lively patterns and floral motifs. Multiform congruence is her paintings’ most gratifying attribute; divergent brushstrokes, lines and textures dance in variegated harmony against bare beige canvas. The artist has spoken of her own experience with ambiguity as a queer mixed-race woman. Perhaps her unclassifiable figures do not represent separate individuals, but different versions of the same person coming to terms with conflicting facets of her own identity.
Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Show runs through May 9
