BEA SCACCIA

The paintings in Groomed depict elaborate, sumptuous scenes filled with accumulations of fabric and various accoutrements of feminine style including wigs, costume jewelry, shoes, belts, zippers, plastic chains, hair clips, bows, tassels, and faux fur. Backed by colorful curtains and patterned wallpaper, and occupied by chairs, beds, and ladders, these nighttime scenarios are illuminated by representations of fringed lamps, clip-on book lights, and precariously placed lit candles. The nocturnal atmosphere is reinforced by the matte surfaces that Scaccia achieves by mixing gesso with acrylic to mute the colors, reworking them with airbrush, and applying oil paint to selected details.

Incorporating an array of deliberately clashing textures and garish colours, these collections of objects come together to approximate faceless bodies and puppetlike limbs that are sheathed in fishnet tights, positioned as if in arrested motion. These partially formed figures appear to attempt activities— sitting, reclining, reading, climbing, and exercising—that they cannot quite complete. Categorically situated between still life and figuration, Scaccia’s works depict an enigmatic realm in which inanimate accessories used for beautification approach, but never fully attain, human form.

While historical figure paintings often juxtapose drapery with bodies to convey refinement, style, and eroticism, the many ersatz materials represented in Groomed are overtly artificial. With their uncanny substitutes for human anatomy, Scaccia’s paintings evoke the Surrealists’ fetishized substitution of objects for figures, particularly in sculptures by Hans Bellmer. Her engagement with the subtexts of materials, abjection, and gender also parallels the work of Mike Kelley, Sarah Lucas, and others. In addition, the artist draws inspiration from magical realist literature, folktales involving metamorphosis and transformation, and the creativity of pop culture.

The exhibition’s largest painting, Heels over Head—or Pillow Talk (2026), is a diptych that parodies the reclining female figure of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), as well as the Rococo subject of a woman reading in a boudoir, as seen in such paintings as Jean Honoré Fragonard’s Young Girl Reading (1769). Rather than the expected contrast between painted flesh and fabric, it represents tangles of cloth and pillows held tenuously together on a bed, faceless but holding up a book.

In other paintings, surrogates for figures occupy chairs, but without managing to fully sit on them. Holding dumbbells and contorted in yoga-like poses, they suggest a mania for fitness and physical self-improvement. Additional works feature ladders over which cloth and other materials are draped and dispersed, climbing nowhere, and hanging like marionettes.

Bea Scaccia was born in Veroli, Italy, in 1978, and lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions include My Hope Chest, Katonah Museum of Art, NY (2021). Group exhibitions include Homemade, Magazzino Italian Art, Cold Spring, NY (2020); Fabrizio Clerici: L’atlante del meraviglioso, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (2022); Fantastica: 18th Quadriennale d’Arte, Palazzo Esposizioni, Rome (2025–26); and Art Museum of West Virginia University, Morgantown (2026–27).