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.