Elizabeth Malaska
Installation View
Installation View
Installation View
Installation View
Installation View
Installation View
Installation View
Installation View
Installation View
Installation View
Star Gazers
2017
oil, Flashe, charcoal, pencil on canvas
50 x 42 inches
Form and Void
2017
oil, Flashe, charcoal, pencil on canvas
48 x 60 inches
Apocrypha
2017
oil, Flashe, charcoal, pencil, glitter on canvas
38 x 50 inches
Lament
2017
oil, Flashe, charcoal, pencil on canvas
47 x 38 inches
Wake to Weep
2017
oil, Flashe, charcoal, pencil on canvas
36 x 47 inches
Event Horizon
2017
oil, Flashe, charcoal, pencil, glitter on canvas
46 x 36 inches
Reflection (1)
2017
charcoal, Flashe on paper
51 x 40 inches
Reflection (2)
2017
charcoal, Flashe, chalk pastel on paper
51 x 50 inches
Volatile Bodies #1
2017
charcoal, chalk pastel on paper
17.5 x 14.5 inches framed
Volatile Bodies #2
2017
charcoal, chalk pastel on paper
17.5 x 14.5 inches framed
Volatile Bodies #3
2017
charcoal, chalk pastel on paper
17.5 x 14.5 inches framed
Volatile Bodies #4
2017
charcoal, chalk pastel on paper
17.5 x 14.5 inches framed
Volatile Bodies #5
2017
charcoal, chalk pastel on paper
17.5 x 14.5 inches framed
Volatile Bodies #6
2017
charcoal, chalk pastel on paper
17.5 x 14.5 inches framed
Volatile Bodies #7
2017
charcoal, chalk pastel on paper
17.5 x 14.5 inches framed
Volatile Bodies #8
2017
charcoal, chalk pastel on paper
17.5 x 14.5 inches framed
Volatile Bodies #9
2017
charcoal, chalk pastel on paper
17.5 x 14.5 inches framed
Volatile Bodies #10
2017
charcoal, chalk pastel on paper
17.5 x 14.5 inches framed
Volatile Bodies #11
2017
charcoal, chalk pastel on paper
17.5 x 14.5 inches framed
Volatile Bodies #12
2017
charcoal, chalk pastel on paper
17.5 x 14.5 inches framed
We are pleased to present our first solo exhibition of new-to-the-gallery artist Elizabeth Malaska. In Heavenly Bodies Malaska paints large tableaux which position the female form as the prime protagonist and instigator in art history. Exploring the embodied experience of the feminine subject under patriarchy, Malaska mines the power given to historically sanctioned signs and re-purposes them along more equitable lines. Malaska is gaining a critical reputation for paintings that explore the place of the female body in a range of art historical contexts, raising issues about femininity, power, domination, and vulnerability, with contemporary social and political implications.
Elizabeth Malaska has been awarded Career Opportunity Grants from both the Oregon Arts Commission and The Ford Family Foundation and The Oregon Community Foundation.
This event was funded in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council.
Join us this Thursday for A Body Full, a performative gesture in response to Elizabeth Malaska's latest exhibition, by Tahni Holt and Luke Wyland. The performance will be followed by a conversation moderated by Meagan Atiyeh of the Oregon Arts Commission.
This performance is supported by the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the Oregon Arts Commission.
We are pleased to announce Elizabeth Malaska's "Still Life on War Rug" has been acquired by the Portland Art Museum.
In the six large paintings on view in Elizabeth Malaska’s exhibition (all works 2017), female nudes in strange interiors smoke, sleep, sob, or stare at smartphones. Shunning furniture, they sit, kneel, recline, or crawl on the floor. Most have cats, as witches have familiars. All appear to possess turbulent inner lives. Painfully distorted and conveying severe unease, the nudes arouse compassion, not desire, rebuking the art historical traditions from which they descend.
Elizabeth Malaska’s recent paintings celebrate the pathos and resilience of the anima, asserting its reproductive and spiritual power over millennia of oppression. At the heart of each work is a figure, or figures, embedded within a nonhierarchical matrix of oneiric visions, plants, decorative objects, and patterned surfaces.
When I got the chance to sit down with painter Elizabeth Malaska to discuss some of what I see in her new exhibition, Heavenly Bodies, at Russo Lee Gallery, I was moved by her intensity and congeniality. It’s an unlikely pairing, maybe, and that’s consistent with her work. Her canvases bear the historical past and the immediate present, and a wide-ranging research of art history and contemporary art grounds her subjects—it also frees them.
Though she [Malaska] names many contemporary feminist influences, her work embodies an uncanny marriage between Sylvia Sleigh and Marlene Dumas. The figures she champions are stargazers in both title and sentiment—unafraid to either dream or weep. The bodies she paints are heavenly in both politic and potential.ow to represent the female form through a keen understanding of figurative and iconographic complexity. Well-placed signifiers of women’s labor and leisure alike elevate her renderings to a thoughtful construction of her subject’s rich inner lives and motivations.
Elizabeth Malaska’s women are no longer bodies in space, but bodies taking space.
As in much of her work, in her new series of six paintings, “Heavenly Bodies,” Malaska depicts female figures in architectural spaces. But where in her earlier work these women drifted coolly in large, sparse, classically detailed spaces and sometimes melded with the patterned walls or floors around them, the grimacing women in her new work push forcibly to the front of their canvases. Writhing and contorted, they press against the edges of the paintings with curled, taloned feet. These women are barely contained.
How about the combination of G. Lewis Clevenger and Elizabeth Malaska at the Russo Lee Gallery? Clevenger’s acrylic abstract paintings lure the viewer with layers of shapes and lines and color that lead deeper and deeper, pulling on the viewer’s own looming memories of forms and lines. Malaska’s work combines various media, textures, and patterns, somewhat reminiscent of Matisse, except in her paintings, the female models are often armed and dangerous.