Caitlin Keogh: Renaissance Painting, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 84 by 63 inches. Courtesy Bortolami, New York.
Caitlin Keogh’s show brings together twelve new examples of the type of paintings for which she has become known: graphic compositions, rendered with flat acrylics and bold outlines, that engage with historical representations of the female body and constructions of female identity. Christian Dior’s autobiography appears in several works, as the book itself and text quoted from it; the revolutionary designer behind the New Look in the 1940s, Dior made the cinched waist part of the ideal female silhouette for decades to come. Headless Woman with Parrot—a pared-down response to Courbet’s erotic Woman with a Parrot (1866)—depicts a reclining mannequin-like female figure bisected at the waist with a multicolored bird perched on her finger. In Renaissance Painting, Keogh adorns the breastplate from a suit of armor with flowerlike female hormonal glands. Here, she self-knowingly depicts the female body as an object with reproductive organs, the way women are too often treated by men in art and in life. —Julia Wolkoff
Pictured: Caitlin Keogh: Renaissance Painting, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 84 by 63 inches. Courtesy Bortolami, New York.