Art Review: 3 Female Voices 9-5-25

After two days of seeing shows across the city, I was struck by how relieved I felt whenever I encountered female made painting that hadn’t absorbed Francis Bacon’s shadow. His legacy of arbitrary chaos rarely opens toward light, it almost always drags downward into something destructive.

At the Ambera Wellmann’s Hauser and Wirth debut exhibition, I stood before a canvas almost 300 inches long: creepy, yes, but formally alive, keeping the eye darting across its surface. It’s a strong painting, though not one I’d ever want to live with. The scale engulfs you, but the mood is chilling rather than human, cool rather than warm. That, I think, is the root of why it disturbs: you can admire the technical invention, but without warmth or depth of humanity, the experience leaves you unsettled rather than enlarged. It pleases the eye, but not the soul. Is it a good painting? I still can’t answer that question. I think because of her technical command I like it, but the subject matter is dark and its existential weight looming large. I am unsure what the larger message is here.

By contrast, Elizabeth Glaessner’s show at PPOW was deeply compelling. She’s a master of mood and soft edge; her palette glows. The paintings are large, commanding, and eerie in their depictions of feminine figures, images that seem to flow between creation and dissolution, water as both life-giving and destructive. I felt moved standing in front of them. Yet even here, there’s an unnerving detachment from the feminine, as though the figures hover in a liminal space, witch-like, brushing against a spirit realm that unsettles as much as it enchants. I find myself trying to learn from her, because what she offers is both powerful and singular: painting that seduces with beauty yet keeps you slightly unmoored, as if the ground under your feet had just turned liquid.

Lastly, I think Maud Madsen is emerging as one of the strongest feminine voices in painting today. But it’s a quiet voice. At Half Gallery’s opening, her work struck me as a rare and urgent meditation on female becoming. She is not interested in fashionable irony or posturing. Instead, she confronts the secret threshold of adolescence, the shock of menstruation, the irrevocable moment when childhood innocence is abandoned and the body is claimed by fertility. Madsen’s canvases yearn to preserve that lost Eden, to construct a sanctuary where innocence can linger even as the demands of womanhood press in. Her art is not creepy but quietly radical: gentle in execution, yet piercing in its recognition of what culture prefers to ignore or over look.

Technically, her oils remain constrained, handled like acrylics, flattened in their opacity. She avoids the scraping, transparency, and exposed line that could give the work greater range and depth. Here, paradoxically, the lessons of Francis Bacon might serve her well, by teaching her to fracture the surface, to admit rupture and variation. But Madsen’s true power lies in her theme: the dangerous, shattering transition from girl to woman. It is a subject she treats with extraordinary tenderness, and it radiates with a primal force, an honesty about innocence, transformation, and the burden of becoming female that too few painters dare to approach.