Since receiving her MFA in 2012, Glaessner has undertaken an evolving pictorial search which she seems to have honed in recent years into a focused path which suits her development. In Dead Leg, her color palette has narrowed to blues, greens and browns; her subjects have been refocused around post-apocalyptic situations essentially featuring women in distress; her style, too, has sharpened and asserted itself: the ambitions of her painting are now precise and explicit.

“Allowing things to not necessarily make sense – that helps me in letting compositional decisions inform a narrative. Not tying myself to reality…that was a critical moment,” she told Interview magazine in July 2014. This is clearly still the case today where the moments that unite the composition of the painting with its narrative seem to have been appeased by an asserted distancing from any temptation of reality. A leg disappears in the rift of the two joined canvases that make up Rabid Hole, 2022, and if the progression of the painting suggests it, a pair of legs will end in the heads of birds in Dead Can Dance, 2020, imprinting a surrealist dimension to a painting ultimately closer to symbolism, where pessimism, esotericism and melancholy seem engaged in a three-step waltz. A symbolism in which the very idea of the femme fatale would have given way to the tragic female destinies imposed by a patriarchal system still intact, as seen in the particular postures of its characters.

Curiously, it was Degas who inspired this exhibition. Glaessner recalls a recent visit to Paris and her discovery at the Musée d’Orsay, of 1865’s Scene of War in the Middle Ages (or The Misfortunes of the Town of Orléans). “When I saw the painting, I was struck by how much it resonated today. At a time when women’s rights are being stripped away and our bodies are once again in peril, I’m reminded of the cyclical nature of humanity and how we cannot seem to escape this battle centered on power and control,” she confides. And in a literal way, the female figure on the right of Degas’s painting lying on the ground, stripped naked, trampled by a horse, is indeed found in Glaessner’s own War in the Middle Ages, 2022. But it is not so much the character that reappears, but the posture, in fact several centuries of painting offer Glaessner an alphabet of postures from which she draws. The fact that her characters sometimes seem to be direct descendants of those in medieval illuminations gives them an unexpected weight.

To this Degas painting seen at the Musee d’Orsay, and to all the studies of bathers from which Glaessner makes no secret of having been inspired, the artist adds Angelica Saved by Ruggiero by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a painting she saw at the Louvre during the same trip whose female figure is naked with her hands tied up. The Degas also draws parallels with Goya’s Disasters of War series whose morbid titles (Bury and be silent, Nothing can be done about it, No one is there to help them or Don’t do that either) and imagery represent the consequences of war, and the sexual abuse suffered by Spanish women.