Tamara Malcher

Tamara Malcher paints large-format canvases of naked, voluminous female bodies in motion, dancing, playing, running or hidden behind thick plant leaves. Her women are loud, active and embodied, a direct answer to the long line of paintings in which male artists showed the female nude reclining, passive and posed for a male gaze. In bright, luminous colour, limbs soften into rubbery forms that move without resistance, and the surfaces stay tense and busy right to the edges of the canvas. In recent work the bodies appear more often in fragments: round bellies over kneeling legs, eyes peering over deep water, hands emerging from a cluster of black chicken feathers. One shape recurs across the paintings as leaf, feather, hair and flame, so that motifs pass into one another and carry several meanings at once.