To Leave More Than A Trace
Installation view of Oh, to Leave a Trace. Courtesy of Zepster Gallery.
Zepster Gallery’s second exhibition, Oh, to Leave a Trace, presents the work of three artists whose practice centers around the physicality of mark-making. Seeing the show’s title, I’m immediately reminded of a dialogue that touches on the existential significance of creating art, from the movie The Intouchables (2011):
PHILIPPE: Why do you think people are interested in art?
DRISS: I don’t know. It’s a business?
PHILIPPE: No. It’s because that’s the only mark one leaves behind.
In fact, the title references Frank O’Hara’s quote: “[S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!” The phrase was then used in Mary Gabriel’s book, Ninth Street Women, which champions the stories of five pioneering women artists in the last century. At Zepster Gallery, these complex sentiments surrounding mark-making convolute in a spirited array of paintings and drawings by emerging artists Gabi Dunayski, Phoebe Kong, and Lauren Krasnoff.
Gabi Dunayski, Pussified Nation, 2024. Oil on canvas, 95 x 141 in. Courtesy of the artist and Zepster Gallery.
Gabi Dunayski’s carnal paintings depict clusters of limbs and sex organs that intertwine in a sinuous and unruly fashion. Whole, individual bodies are indistinguishable in these orgiastic compositions, which subvert biblical motifs by bordering the grotesque and confronting the human psyche. In the large-scale painting Pussified Nation (2024), for instance, cathartic patches of fleshy pinks and reds evoke the aesthetic sensibilities of Cecily Brown and Francis Bacon, while the jumbled bodily configurations are very much reminiscent of Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1965). Commanded by curvaceous and repeating body parts, Dunayski’s canvases are violent and sensual.
Phoebe Kong, I wave my arms, I swat my face. The swarm picks up the pace, 2024. Pastel, charcoal, and colored pencil on paper. 41 x 48 in (framed). Courtesy of the artist and Zepster Gallery.
The work of Phoebe Quin Kong opens up a whimsical universe of Boschian creatures in seeming distress. In I wave my arms, I swat my face. The swarm picks up the pace (2024), for instance, a multi-limbed figure is itching for relief from a swarm of flies. In the window frame series, each drawing functions as a somewhat voyeuristic portal, as the viewer peeks at the uncanny caricatures covered in body hair and exposed to hostile landscapes.
Lauren Krasnoff, grandstand crowd, 2024. Oil on canvas, 40 x 38 in. Courtesy of the artist and Zepster Gallery.
Lauren Krasnoff imbues her work with a sense of kinetic rapidity. The semi-abstracted, faceless crowds almost look like an upbeat reproduction of Corporate Memphis figures. The salient contrast between yellow, blue, and black marks the artist’s daring experimentation with color and brushwork. These works perfectly capture the energy of a weekend football game, an NYC subway station during rush hour, or a protest that floods the streets.
In Theodora Bocanegra Lang’s recent review of Lauren Elkin’s book Art Monsters, she describes a Genieve Figgis painting as depicting a woman who is “aware of the constructed nature of her identity … [and who] creates and destroys herself.” To unpack monstrosity in art as both form and persona, Elkin writes: “Art monstrosity… stages the dismantling of artifice to reveal that there is no unvarnished truth beneath; the skin comes away with the make-up; hand and face become one. There is beauty here but it is the ucky beauty of entropy, of unmaking, of the smear, the scratch, the slash.” In Oh, to Leave a Trace, the works do not intend to seduce or attract with their formal allure. Instead, they invigorate, estrange, make unrecognizable, and reconfigure bodies that have historically been passive subjects of depiction. No longer presented in a beautified format to the viewer’s delight, these images are sometimes alien but always forceful. Bodies are suspended in varying states of metamorphosis and disintegration, eliciting a visceral reaction in all their discomfort, speed, and confrontation.
Oh, to Leave a Trace is on view at Zepster Gallery, 220 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, from July 12 to August 31, 2024.
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