ELIZABETH GLAESSNER: HEAD GAMES

Perrotin announces Head Games by the artist Elizabeth Glaessner. These figures are often depicted in moments of movement or transition. Glaessner’s process, like the figures she comes to depict, is about transformation.

July 2 - August 31, 2024

“Head Games,” an exhibition of fifteen of Glaessner’s small paintings alongside two of larger scale, demonstrates the strength and scope of her painterly aesthetic. Pictorialism, process, and performance converge in these works, revealing not only her facility with the oil medium but also how our perception of ourselves and others depends on a play of imagination and reality.

With Glaessner often and repeatedly blurring her compositions with a careful swipe of a large brush, it can seem as if these figures are submerged in water or a haze, and it’s tempting to see this as Houston’s influence on Glaessner’s vision. But more directly, a 2019-2020 stay at Galveston Artist Residency, situated between the Bay and Gulf, where the sky and water meet, galvanized Glaessner’s work.

These new paintings continue several longtime thematic interests of Glaessner’s, including narratives from Western literature and Greek mythology alike. Nut (or Nwt), the Egyptian deity; goddess of the visible sky is frequently alluded to in several compositions through an arched body

Though requiring less physicality than her largescale works, the smaller paintings are nevertheless just as gestural and material. Careful looking reveals how she fashions her visceral textures through meticulous application of layers and layers of paint, which are then manipulated to reveal sumptuous rugged surfaces. Several works here are enriched with small glass beads Glaessner mixed with paint to give both oil and canvas something to resist.

This call-and-response is aesthetically implied in the bending and crawling position that several figures here assume. On all fours, these figures oscillate between carnal or childlike, their pose derived from Blake, Cranach, and model horses alike. Several works include pairs of trios of such figures as if the larger one has spawned the smaller ones, such as Grass Play or Head Games.

Or, as in Creature, the figure fills almost the entirety of the picture plane, its head tilted upward with a haunting, searching look in its eyes. Their body is aqua-green, a color found throughout these paintings, as in Sphinx with arms and Sirens. In both, a strip of light sandy brown lines the bottom edge, as if the sphinx figure is lying in the sand of an ocean floor, and a phantasmic smaller figure seems to float behind them, caught in the rhythms of the sea.