Undercurrents

Elizabeth Glaessner has always been fascinated by subliminal messages. The Brooklyn-based painter dates it back to the late nights she spent telling her younger sister bedtime stories from the bottom bunk bed of their Houston home. At François Ghebaly’s Los Angeles outpost, the artist deals with emotional gray areas and moral indifference with hazy figures and bodies of water. Her first solo exhibition in the city, “Now you’re a lake,” is a sensually surreal experience. Scenes are drenched in chromatic tones that resemble thermal weather-maps, and amorphous figures bend and distort into one another. 

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In Under Toe, 2024, three nude women cast in teal hues move eerily through a body of water, caught in an undercurrent. A woman gazes out as her nude body floats just above the surface. Another, more nebulous figure rests at the bottom. A short distance away, a partially shoulder-deep body with blurred facial features indifferently watches the seemingly fatal interaction. Several of these paintings in the exhibition draw from ancient Greek and Roman myths, such as Echo and Narcissus and The Sphinx’s riddle. Her work, Head in the Water, 2024, reimagines a Narcissus-like figure submerged in the water of his own reflection. 

In 2014, Glaessner’s first solo exhibition, “All this happened, more or less,” at PPOW gallery in New York, familiar creatures such as donkeys and fish are reimagined in a post-human, post-apocalyptic context: a cast of piercing eye sockets, asymmetrical mouths, and other distorted features. Donkey Face, 2014, depicts a misshapen donkey with asymmetrical facial features. At the time she described the creatures’ peculiarities as an ode to the potential for ecological renewal rather than a depiction of destruction. “They’re trying to figure out their purpose,” she suggested. A decade later, Glaessner continues to reflect and bend the world to her imagination. The result is a singular, introspective environment. 

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“Now you’re a lake” is on view through May 11, 2024 at François Ghebaly at 2245 E Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA.

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