Riisa Gundesen: "Chair/Chère"

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Riisa Gundesen, "Pull," 2017

oil on canvas, 67" x 65 ½”

For Riisa Gundesen, the female body is the prime register of social and psychic contest. Her troubled self-portraits are both seductive for their dazzling painterliness, and darkly repulsive. In one painting a masterful body conjoins subtly-rendered flesh, and bold, Matisse-like outlines with a startling skin-rash of erupted paint that culminates in a leg of bloody red. Her (subject’s) gaze ranges from bored and self-absorbed to ‘nyah nayh nyah’, repudiating any possibility of easy consumption.

Gundesen is clearly drawn to the classic tropes of the masters but her figures adopt the pathologies and neuroses of contemporary life. Her flesh is polluted, her postures are aggressive and her subjects are disturbed. But behind these unrelenting reiterations of fleshly mortality, there lurks a recalcitrant spirit that refuses to throw in the towel.