4 Artists

Talia Levitt creates faux-tromp l’oeil quilted spaces that serve as the background against which myriad objects collected from the artist’s life are positioned. The artist often employs the technique of mise en abyme, referencing her own artworks, art historical icons, and her family archives. Engaging the modernist logic of the grid, Levitt’s linear marks serve too as the stitches of her depicted textile weaves, just as they elide with the very grain of the stretched canvas itself, resulting in a unique meta-material allusion. Transparent figures or facial details emerge from the patchwork of textiles and objects suggesting constant humanity. A closer look at these material constellations reveals at once an earnest feminism and cheeky humor that mark her work.

Maud Madsen’s intrepid coming-of-age compositions are constructed moments of the artist’s experiences that become legible through their own fantastic, sometimes nostalgic, logic. As if snapshots into a bildungsroman without the completed narrative arc, Madsen’s scenes depict youthful subjects undertaking various activities from dramatic vantage points. Her saturated color tones encourage the emotional context of the scene while the angled points of view allow the artist to contort and capture the women’s bodies’ choreographies in all their fleshy, awkward, and sensual glory. Viewers have limited access to the youthful figures as their faces are hidden from optical reach. Madsen refuses to idealize her subjects’ bodies: the authenticity of her figures, with their epidermal textures and corporeal accumulations, suggest the process of exploring and coming to terms with those bountiful insecurities of adolescence.