Statement:

Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present Women on the Verge, curated by Lisa Wainwright. The exhibition includes works by 27 artists and examines the prevalence in painting today of eccentric sendups of women by those who identify as women.

With the hearty return of figurative painting in the last decade, it seems timely to take the pulse of a facet of feminist expression that currently lampoons the female body. Wrestling with the grand tradition of the bather and the reclining nude in art history, these distorted and contorted sisters are a convulsive response to the myriad pressures within a society on the verge of a nervous breakdown, as Pedro Almodóvar prophetically put it in his film of 1982.

Such visual rhetorics speak to the concerns of those breaking the colonial gaze, or those queering representation, or those asserting a satirical engagement with heteronormative poses, or some intersection of all. Our current climate of judicial conservatism with the abolition of Roe v. Wade makes such images of torqued women all the more timely to assess.