GROUP EXHIBITION

The participating artists share a powerfully sensual approach to their respective disciplines, whether abstract painting, figurative vignettes, large-format photography or ceramics. Working within, and playing with, the traditions of landscape, portrait, and architectural painting, the works on view echo each other in subtly subversive ways. The ‘something woman*’ of the title is a gesture towards ambiguity, of multitudes undefined but generously explored.

In LA-based artist Amy Bessone’s painting Double Fantasy (Copper Bolt) (2023), archetypal feminine figures reminiscent of classical statues stand against a pulsating backdrop of purples and pinks. Bessone’s palette and forms are contrasted with the contained frescos and baroque décor framed in Candida Höfer’s photograph Reggia di Portici Portici I (2009). Höfer’s palace of high culture, emptied of people, finds its own echo in Gretchen Scherer’s painting of the interior of a Gothic revival library furnished abundantly with books and portraits. Though similarly empty of visitors, it too vibrates with a sense of latent activation. Awaiting activation too, perhaps, are the Prada wedge shoes in bronze, platinum and chrome from 2003 by Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury, which simultaneously seduce with their metallic sheen as well as suggest the presence of an absent wearer.

In a palette close to that of Bessone, or the lush brushwork found in London-born Jemima Murphy’s abstract paintings in vivid blossom hues, are the expressive paintings of storms both internal and external by Russian-born, Brooklyn-based Maria Kreyn. Recalling the turbulence of JMW Turner’s romantic seascapes, Kreyn’s roiling seas have their counterpoint in Hungarian painter Márta Kucsora’s highly gestural abstract works, which are inspired by biological processes happening deep within nature and often monumental in scale. Zoe Williams’ glazed ceramic Green Fingers (2019), meanwhile, has a similarly organic, sensual feel, reminiscent of a handheld mirror edged with moving serpentile forms.

There is sensuality and disquiet in British artist WK Lyhne’s two-metre tall paintings of vertically positioned ewes. Titled Big Women I and 2 (both 2024), the works draw a parallel between the female form and the soft, pliable bodies of ewes. Also on view are paintings of bucolic sceneslaced with suggestions of violence on the female body, inspired by the archetypal porcelain figurines by Sèvres and Meissen and subverted. (Lyhne conceived the title of the exhibition, with its nod to Shakespeare’s witches, reclaiming for these marginal and maligned figures theirpowers of creativity and foresight.)

The body is further referenced in paintings that gesture towards intimacy and interiority. The depths of the self are referenced in Swiss artist Liliane Tomasko’s charged abstract painting Portrait of the Self (On the Surface, Dreaming of What Lies Below) (2024). Elsewhere, Viennese artist Anouk Lamm Anouk’s works on unprimed linen directly attract the viewer’s attention by opening up a portal into uncharted worlds of abstraction and figuration. In post/pre N°28 (2023), a bright and carefully applied circle serves as both an anchor and as an invitation to linger and enjoy the present moment. With Lesbian Jazz N°75 (2024), the viewer is contrastingly a bystander and witness to a moment of intimacy and trust, the painting part of a bigger body of work calling for visibility and equality, and intended to show the complexity of life. Fellow Austrian artist Xenia Hausner presents a brightly hued and figurative vision of two women embracing. One woman leans in lovingly while the other gazes at something outside of the frame, in an ambiguous staging of intricate relations—a metaphor, perhaps, for the interplay of all of the works here on view.