
Built in 1930, the grand Art Deco tower housing Mary Boone’s uptown branch plays perfect host to Caitlin Keogh’s exhibition “The Corps.” In the young painter’s latest body of work, ’30s fashion illustration meets contemporaneous Surrealist fantasies, filtered through a theoretical lens informed by feminist psychoanalysis. Keogh’s heavily outlined figures sketch the complicated terrain between desire, fetishism and violence. Primary colors and jewel tones dominate throughout, as do motifs nodding to bondage (knotted ropes, twisting vines), pattern plays, and headless (mostly female) bodies. In The Illustrator (2014), a book flagged with Post-it notes and punctured with holes rests in a deathly white hand, its cover depicting a nude woman’s torso whose head is replaced with a reddish slit. It’s not all about victimhood, however. Two unassuming drawings, which look like simple geometric patterns from afar, reveal lines composed of repetitive text in a feminine cursive. A key statement—”She belongs to whoever wants her. She feels whatever they feel”—suggests an exchange of power, a game of seduction carried over into the show’s decadent imagery.