The political implications of post-feminism cannot be ignored in the show of recent oil paintings by Molly Crabapple. It is

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this political dimension that lends Crabapple a deeper meaning to her art and, perhaps, a more personal history. These paintings have a feminist message, but also a political message, and Crabapple has put it into the hands of a woman, a direct woman in a body-language that is more masculine than feminine.The paintings in the show are meant to be taken as an indictment of the ways in which culture is made to conform to masculine ideals of masculinity. In this respect, Crabapple seems to be taking on the culture that gave rise to those ideals, the culture of masculinity, which she aims to reverse. In the process, she has crossed boundaries between painting and activism, and between painting and painting itself, by both painting and calling into question the modernist monolithic painting of painting.

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The political implications of post-feminism cannot be ignored in the show of recent oil paintings by Molly Crabapple. It is not the pornography of the male gaze that this artist proposes but rather the pseudo-masculinity that we find in her work: a man, in this case a white male, who, like many men, has been sexually harassed. These paintings are like papa-faced bravura drawings that are for a moment pretty sexy, but then become threatening when viewed alone. Like the other works in the show, they are paintings about the man, a man who has been harassed. The paintings are thus paintings of men who have been harassed, and these men, like the men in the show, are empowered by it. Yet in their paintings they are not themselves victims; they are not passive; they are not puppets. Instead, they are the brave new men who can turn against the man who harassed them. What is perhaps most interesting about these works is that their sexual politics is not so much what they are, but what they are. In effect, the paintings are social statements, and as such they are not simply a commentary on the man who harassed them. It is no exaggeration to say that these paintings are about mans harassment of women.These paintings are not without political content, but it is not a matter of turning against the man who harassed them. Instead, they show that man can turn against himself. In fact, it is the man who harassed himself that is more important than the man who harassed his wife and child. Theres an intensity that is invigorating and powerful in these paintings, a subtle but powerful energy that one can easily detect even in ones everyday life. It is not simply the power of the gestures, but rather the intensity of their rhythm that makes them powerfully moving. They are beautifully painted, and the colors seem rich with a subtle moodiness. These paintings are, in a sense, self-portraits, in that they are about the artists self-image as an artist and about painting as an act of self-recognition.

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in Crabapples works that one finds oneself seeing the continued power of the hand, a hand that is both expressive and spiritual. Crabapple has painted in response to male art history and rhetoric, to the rhetoric of art that reflects male power and hegemony. Her paintings, which reflect a call for the male artist to be more fully involved in the feminist conversation, are mostly abstract, but with the occasional figural element. The works are often large and show a very diverse range of black-on-black backgrounds. Crabapple focuses her colors on both the surface of the painting and its support, both of which are meant to be extremely provocative. The paintings are abstract; they are not just abstract. They are about the point of being. The artist has to be aware that these paintings are not just abstract. They are also about blackness. It is not an abstract or metaphoric blackness, but an actual blackness, in the same way as it is a real black in relation to the audience, the public. These paintings have a powerful effect of critical distance, of contrast to the literal and rhetorical distance of contemporary black male art. In them, Crabapple has managed to articulate a very personal call for more black on black painting, more black on black. Her work is an important and radical statement of feminist art.

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The political implications of post-feminism cannot be ignored in the show of recent oil paintings by Molly Crabapple. It is a pleasure to encounter so many contemporary works that seem so positively invigorating. Crabapple has been considered an expert on post-humanism, but her canvases are seductive, and as much as I like her work, I can never decide if shes an expert or a true novice.Crabapple began painting in the mid-80s, but the early paintings of the early 2000s, for which she is best known, were more than just a one-off gesture: They were a meditation on painting itself. In the paintings, the artist had painted the backs of her canvases in white and black, then layered the backgrounds of the paintings, which were in turn layered in layers, like paper and velvet. These layers, like a formal and repetitive discipline, were crumpled, made crumpled, and then painted over and over again, creating paintings whose surfaces were so flat and hard to find, they seemed to be stretched. The artist has always been very conscious of the relationship between painting and materials, and the recent paintings are no exception. The series consists of painted plaster-and-plaster surfaces, which are layered in a way that recalls the way a seam is pinned in fabric. But the surfaces are painted over in layers of clear paint, with a layer of plaster in the upper half. The colors in these paintings are not actually in the paint, but are all applied in a thin layer. This opaque and painted layer seems to represent the painter, who is obscured by the layers of paint. In the paintings, the paint is just as transparent, so that its potential as color is somewhat compromised by the plaster, which also makes the paint seem a material part of the plaster. In the paintings of the early 2000s, the colors looked like mirror-finish lacquers, with the color in the plaster and paint acting as both substance and mirror image.

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no accident that her work is informed by a tradition that is traced from the mid-70s through the present, from Frank Stellas polishing of the paint with his signature mixture of acrylic and enamel (Untitled, 2000) to the political consciousness of the battle cry of Just Say No (Nothings War, 2003), a call to arms issued by some members of the feminist punk band Bikini Kill in response to the Iraq invasion. For her oil paintings, Crabapple has to be careful, to use only the most refined of gestures, the most self-evident and accurate of marks. One needs to be able to tell the difference between the surface and the skin, and to do so without the artist drawing attention to her role as a mark-maker. This is not to say that the works are without interest, but they are much more about the reception of the artist than about affecting a critical response.