Four legs in a garden—Glaessner’s first exhibition in a French institutional context—is hung luxuriously under Le Consortium’s vast 12-meter ceiling in their monumental White Box gallery. The show’s general similarity benefits from this grandeur and includes three new works of paths and party scenes that were created specifically for the exhibition site. Though some of the canvases are small, they all uses the electric hues of a Fauvist palette. 

The book Gay Propaganda, edited by Masha Gessen, was published in January of 2014, on the eve of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, and right before the invasion of Crimea. It collects personal accounts of LGBTQ+ life in Russia in response to the laws criminalizing public discussions of homosexuality and banning LGBTQ+ couples from adopting children. Every speech that Putin currently makes justifying the new invasion of Ukraine has railed against "so called gender freedoms," equating basic human dignity to a decadent luxury such as oysters or foie gras.

The notion of stories, bodies, and selves that change incrementally and radically as they repeat pervades the mesmerizing world of Glaessner’s Phantom Tail.

“The feelings that I want to convey … I don’t always have the words to describe,” explains painter Elizabeth Glaessner amidst the large, beautifully painted and somewhat mysterious canvases that make up her solo show at the P·P·O·W gallery in Lower Manhattan.

The air is thick, you’re drifting through a hazy, uncertain world, and visibility is not on your side. Obscure humanlike figures move intentionally slow through abstract pools of color and light. You make out a hand, a fingernail, a toe, but the rest is unclear. Impossibly long limbs wrap you in a warm embrace, and you feel, perhaps for the first time, safe. There are no power structures, no capitalism, no gender, just primitive reflections of emotional states. As you saunter through psychological landscapes, these spirits guide you, divorce you from your mortality, and regenerate you in their making—one free of humanity, of guilt, and most of all, free of pain.

A biographical detail about this Brooklyn-based artist sheds light on both the mythological anatomies and the amniotic quality of her bewitching new paintings: Glaessner was born with a protruding tailbone. In her current show, “Phantom Tail,” supernatural creatures—a deliquescent sphinx, a spidery humanoid in a turquoise pool—occupy worlds that are alternately smoldering and coolly luminescent. 

From a series of mesmerizing paintings by up-and-coming star Elizabeth Glaessner to Peter Moore's fascinating documentation of New York's performance art, these exhibitions are not to be missed

P·P·O·W is pleased to present Elizabeth Glaessner’s third exhibition with the gallery, Phantom Tail. Siphoning inspiration from an evolving pool of art historical, mythological, and cultural references, and inspired by symbolist painters such as Edvard Munch, Glaessner conjures a surreal universe of hypnotic landscapes populated by androgynous doppelgangers, sphinxes, fiends, mirages, and more. Throughout the exhibition, Glaessner’s paintings act as portals, shepherding us into a world unmoored by virtue or vice where all manner of myths coexist without predetermined moral resolution.

My paintings are fluid in both material and content. Shifting between water-based pigments and oils, I pour paint onto the surface and work wet-into-wet to create a psychological space where amorphous forms and figures merge with each other and their environment. 

This past September, the state of Texas enacted the most restrictive abortion ban currently in effect in the United States. The law, Senate Bill 8, prohibits abortions as early as six weeks into the pregnancy—a time period in which most women are unware they are even pregnant. The state’s sweeping legislation also makes no exceptions for people who are victims of rape or incest. The bill is part of a national agenda to end access to abortion across the U.S., including the landmark case Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court could possibly overturn—triggering bans in 26 states to go into effect within months.

Visiting galleries were required to quarantine, and many have found help for their booths from local players.

“Artists on Our Radar” is a monthly series produced collaboratively by Artsy’s Editorial and Curatorial teams. Utilizing our art expertise and access to Artsy data, each month, we highlight five artists who have our attention. To make our selections, we’ve determined which artists made an impact this past month through new gallery representation, exhibitions, auctions, art fairs, or fresh works on Artsy.

what are these anthropo­morphic creatures, the toxic palette, and the orgiastic tableaux telling us? is it a psychedelic eden or a bad trip, stories of survivalism or genderless sexuality?