Karin Davie 2025 by Miles McEnery Gallery

THE LURKING BODY:

ABSTRACTION AND THE FEMININE IN THE WORK OF KARIN DAVIE

Jane Ursula Harris

In the 1991 summer issue of Arts Magazine, Shirley Kaneda wrote an essay titled “Painting and Its Others, In the Realm of the Feminine.” In the essay, she argued that abstraction was capable of addressing issues of gender—and in doing so could liberate the genre from its stale endgame of art for art’s sake. Kaneda’s invocation of the feminine was less about essentialism and more about destabilizing universalist claims of “quality” that had devalued the subjective and the sensuous, the ambivalent and the playful. As Kaneda pointed out, such “non-masculine strategies” were disparaged even among male abstract artists; they were perceived as dilutions of the rigorous formalism that had long defined modernist criteria for great abstract painting.

A lot has changed since then, but it’s important to note that it was within this context that the artist Karin Davie came of age artistically. In 1991, she had moved to New York following graduate school and was experimenting with strategies that Kaneda labeled “non-masculine.”

Untitled, Large Round Spaced Eyelash Drawing, 1990, False Eyelashes on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76.2 x 55.9 cm)

Lip Drawing, 1990, Lipstick on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76.2 x 55.9 cm)

Living in a small Brooklyn apartment, she was making her Eyelash Drawings (1991), gluing dense layers of black false eyelashes around holes cut into paper. She was thinking about Agnes Martin’s wavering minimalist line work with its emphasis on the hand and Méret Oppenheim’s cheeky surrealism. Deliberately merging the nonobjective with the corporeal, she conjured winking eyes, gashes, apertures, and voids. Her large-scale “Lip Drawings,” made the same year, employed lowbrow cosmetic materi -

als as femme signifiers. For these, she imprinted a lipstick-slathered mouth onto the surface of paper over and over again, until the legibility of these kiss-marks was subsumed by an all-over veil. Early on, both works established the artist’s interests in the performative potential of mark-making through repetition and movement, and both irreverently explored tensions between the abstract and the anthropomorphic. Shapeshifting between gesture and image, they revealed her ongoing desire to externalize the subjective sensual body through paradoxical acts of revelation and concealment.

The allusions to what the artist described to me over a Zoom call as “cavernous cleavage” in her diptych series; In Out, In Out (1993-1995) is a perfect example. Slyly scaled in the center to reference a torso (and the scale and reach of Davie’s own body), the panels are painted in wavy horizontal stripes of buoyant color to mirror one another. Their horizontal layers of hot and cool colors—black, yellow, orange, brown, periwinkle, green—heave and fall in unison, forming a valley between two vertical breast-like mounds. The expressive drips of paint that slide down here and there appear like random leaks, evoking both process and body fluids. She describes these dual associations as intentional, a play between doubling and the double take, the conceptual and intuitive, representation and abstraction. While art history (including op art, abstract expressionism, neo-geometric conceptualism) is no doubt a major inspiration, Davie draws upon many sources in her work. They are both exter-

Left to right: In Out, In Out #1 & #2, 1992, In Out, In Out series, Oil on canvas, each panel: 84 x 66 inches (213.4 x 167.6 cm); In Out, In Out #5 & #6, 1992, In Out, In Out series, Oil on canvas, each panel: 84 x 66 inches (213.4 x 167.6 cm)

1 Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Interview with Karin Davie.

nal—cinema, dance, astronomy, ideas around doubling, medical imaging, and advertising aimed at women—and internal.

Davie is best known for her iconic large-scale stripey wave and coil paintings that undulate, bulge and recede. Their trippy sense of animated movement gives them a living, breathing presence. It’s as if a current courses through them, pushing out at viewers and sucking us in. These embodied sensations recall the artist’s own movements in making the work; a structuring tool that engenders not just form but emotion and idea. It’s this incursion into the space of the observer that reveals Davie’s subversive use of the stripe as a catalyst for more than just optical tricks. “Conceptually I wanted to take this modernist ideal of purity, perfection, and dominance,” she explained in an interview she did for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, “and turn it into an image of something more vulnerable, imperfect, and playful.” 1 More feminine, one could say, especially when these qualities are brought together through color, light, and form. Dana DeGiulio calls it “bitch formalism,” a term the queer painter coined in 2016 in a treatise-poem that declares (in part):

Bitch Formalism

Cuts the fat, all the way to the bone.

Laughs. Understands laughter as an hydraulic that relieves the organism of the responsibility of actual violence…

Repeats itself. Only asks.

Insists that nothing is exhausted but that everything is already over. This makes us free. 2

Her words are a perfect way to encapsulate the obsessive repetitive and burlesque nature of Davie’s painting, where the idea of the circular and repetitive—like that of doubling and the double-take—is so pervasive. Explaining her work, she will refer back to earlier works as the genesis for later ones. Certain motifs—holes and apertures, as well as her signature stripes—recur as formal and mnemonic echoes of her body’s laments and pleasures, its constant lurking. The poked finger holes in Introvert no 1 or 2 (2008), a cast resin work illuminated with LED lights, reprises ideas from her 1995 self-por-

2 “Bitch Formalism, A Treatise by Dana DeGiulio” (2016).

trait Polaroid series, Wanting to Be a Painting, where she captured herself under bed sheets with cut-out holes, holding a bright light source. The flickering patches of arsenic green that glow between tight bloodred and charcoal-green loops in Symptomania (2007-2008) resonate from her early work as well.

Introvert no 2, 2008, Soft Spots series, Paint and pigment on resin with LED’s, 57 x 45 x 3 inches (144.8 x 114.3 x 7.6 cm)

Left to right: Symptomania no 1, 2008, Symptomania series, Oil on linen, 66 x 84 inches (167.6 x 213.4 cm); Symptomania no 7, 2008, Symptomania series, Oil on linen, 72 x 96 inches (182.9 x 243.8 cm)

Symptomania was the last series Davie made before she left New York after being diagnosed with Lyme Disease. Its collision of the exuberant and the sickly, the illusionistic and the material, takes on new meaning when we know the circumstances under which the series was created. The Symptomania series conjures the psychological dimensions behind such contradictory impulses and the fertile place where the autobiographical and the formal converge. Those who believe art should speak for itself—that to consider biography is to thwart that independence—often fail to realize that the autobiographical and the formal can converge. Such thinking is as elitist as those hierarchies of value that Kaneda warned of decades ago.

Regardless, the body—as material conduit, living archive, and unreliable image—courses through Davie’s work, connecting viewers to the artist in immersive if surreptitious ways. Standing before one of her imposing 6-by-8-foot works, our bodies are immediately overwhelmed by their disorienting illusions. In her recent work, her optical antics are subtly thwarted by reminders that we are still looking

3 Barbara A. MacAdam, “Karin Davie Paintings Continue to Explore Mind, Body, and Space,” Art & Object (November 8, 2021).

at an object. Consider the seams in Fight-or-Flight, Fight-or-Flight no 1 (2022), a diptych that fuses together a single image while defying pictorial cohesion. Inspired by space travel and the heavens, as well as the physiological reaction implied by the title, it engulfs us in its steep diagonal waves of dark gradient blue. To take it all in is to lurch in space, to feel unmoored, as if the sky is falling, or one is drowning in an optical tsunami. But Davie’s inclusion of a radiant white streak that abruptly disconnects as it crosses from one seam to the next, like the throbbing fuchsia ribbon that triangulates the bottom left corner, brings us back to ourselves—and the reality of paint on canvas.

Fight-or-Flight, Fight-or-Flight no 1, 2022, Fight-or-Flight, Fight-or-Flight series, Oil on linen, 72 x 96 inches (182.9 x 243.8 cm)

Left to right: In The Metabolic no 2, 2022, In The Metabolic series, Oil on linen over shaped stretcher, 72 x 72 inches (182.9 x 182.9 cm); In The Metabolic no 9, 2022, In The Metabolic series, Oil on linen over shaped stretcher, 72 x 72 inches (182.9 x 182.9 cm)

Davie lost her brother in 2016, and that painful loss, along with her chronic illness, haunts such works as much as her desire to unsettle viewers through her perceptual manipulations. Barbara MacAdam touched on this when she wrote: “Davie portrays immersion and recovery, body and soul, sickness and health.” 3 In this sense, the seam is a visual anchor against the destabilizing effects of her undulating waves—a lifeline that saves us from their seductive dangers. So are the shaped canvases of In the Metabolic (2019), with their tab-like thumbs and mouse holes, and the waved bottoms of While My Painting Gently Weeps (2019). It’s no coincidence that Davie began incorporating these formal devices in response to the destabilizing effects of her illness. Their curved forms reprise the traces of thumbs, knees, and buttocks that left their mark or otherwise got in the way of her rhythmic gestural process. Rather than “fix” these intrusive accidents, Davie mischievously exaggerated them, deploying them to keep viewers off balance as they navigate her enticing illusions and their eventual collapse.

In Trespasser (2025), one of two new series on view at the Miles McEnery Gallery, Davie’s signature waves show signs of implosion. As if propelled by an entropic force that exerts itself from the edges, their horizontal seas of monochromatic color—fleshy pink, grayish blue, and yellow wheat—bunch up in the center to form what Davie calls “anxious vibrations.” These agitated spinal depressions line up with the inverted thumb shapes notched into the top as if to convey a gravitational pull. Conjuring bodies—human and celestial—invisible to the naked eye, they allude to electrical currents, medical imaging, and deviant waveforms rippling through the space-time of our minds.

While My Painting Gently Weeps no 4, 2019, While My Painting Gently Weeps series, Oil on linen over shaped stretcher, 74 1/2 x 108 inches (189.2 x 274.3 cm)

Strange Terrain (2025), also on view, is represented by two paintings in the exhibition, both of which return us to the cosmetic colors of her early lipstick work, though here they also imply muscle tissue, blood, and bruising. Such oscillations between the irreverent and abject feel decidedly feminine in Davie’s hands. Like the wet-on-wet gradients of fleshy pinks and reds that she uses to create such associations, they summon an alternately exuberant and vulnerable body. This sensation of wavering between seemingly contrary states of being is enhanced by the paintings’ horizontal formats, which embed and reclaim historical metaphors of the female body as landscape. Expanding ideas around the interplay of ecosystems and nervous systems, and the power of topophilia, they evoke the sublime and oceanic nature of the Pacific Northwest, which Davie now calls home. They also harken back to an early and profound encounter the artist had with the landscape paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe: “They were depictions of the red mountains, north of Santa Fe where she lived. What I remember so vividly, staying with me all these years, was how much the mountains looked like figures—like

squished fleshy bodies, or raw meat! They were so anthropomorphic and corporeal. I marveled at how she so beautifully depicted the majesty of that landscape and married it with something sensual and erotic. It’s a jarring contrast, one arousing both the earthly and metaphysical. I’m drawn to this kind of duality and its uncanny counterpose.” 4

Just as her earlier diptychs did, Strange Terrain features abutting stretchers that announce their off-center seams with cheeky aplomb. Those stretchers do more than just expose the work’s mesmerizing artifice; they enlist us as both activators of Davie’s illusions and witnesses to their lies. Inviting us to look within ourselves for signs of the familiar and the strange, these hypnotic new works revel in the subversively corporeal. This is the artist’s inimitable gift to us. That, and her insistence on limning the pleasures and pain of this mortal life through images and gestures that are unabashedly feminine. Not only does she invigorate the legacy of abstract painting by doing so; one could say she liberates it—just as Kaneda predicted.

4 Email correspondence with the artist.

Jane Ursula Harris is a Brooklyn-based writer and art historian who has contributed to Artforum, Art in America, Bookforum, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Cultured Magazine, The Paris Review, Flash Art, Frieze, The Believer, Garage, and the Village Voice, among other publications. Her essays appear in catalogues including Addison Gallery of American Art’s Hayes Prize 2025: Tommy Kha, Other Things Uttered (2025); Carnegie Mellon/ICA Miller’s Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth (2021); Kunsthalle Hamburg’s Werner Buttner: The Last Lecture Show (2021); Participant Inc.’s NegroGothic: M. Lamar (2019); Hatje Cantz’s Examples to Follow: Expeditions in Aesthetics and Sustainability (2011); Kerber Verlag’s Marc Lüders: The East Side Gallery (2005); Phaidon’s Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (2005), Universe-Rizzoli’s Curve: The Female Nude Now (2003); Phaidon’s Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (2002); and Twin Palms’ Anthony Goicolea (2003). Harris also curates on a freelance basis, and is currently a visiting critic at New York University.

78 x 129 inches

198 x 328 cm

Strange Terrain no 4, 2025

Oil on linen

60 x 105 inches

152 x 267 cm

Strange Terrain no 5, 2025

Oil on linen