Lana Malakhoff’s 's recent body of works betrays the influence of expressionist figure drawing and painting—most notably, the corporeal current that runs from Lucian Freud up through Jenny Saville. Adumbrating her bulbous, fleshy women—whose distended, bruised, maroon-crested bellies and buttocks stack into corporeal mounts of flesh—with zipping, flaming brushwork, the artist de-humanizes the subject. Yet by retaining compositional verism and identity-giving facial features—eyes, noses, lips, cheekbones—Malakhoff executes a captivating painterly admixture.

The artist’s frenetic strokes mend into adipose tissues of creasing texture, her works enjoying the effect of not only imbricating the depicted women in movement but giving them an all-too-human emotional fervor. Screams, jeers and sobs are made palpable through painterly decisions rather than agape mouths or tears; the latter subsist, but are diminutive in comparison to free-flowing black, maroon, and tangerine flame-zips cascading over aquamarine pools of flesh. So often, Malakhoff’s depicted women's facial features are captured with just enough verisimilitude to grant them recognizability, though in a number of paintings all bodily facets are relegated to a glowing ebb. These are the most abstract works, where flesh overtakes flesh. Delineations of mauve pool into bisque-gold, triangulated mounds indicating thighs, a brown bun indexing a swivelled head, and curved, shifting crevices meting out where flesh pleats flesh. In these pieces of pocketing skin, one sees the rapprochement of Delacroix's draughtsmanship—the wagging, sinuous curved line communicating pathos—and expressionism’s facture beyond edges.

Malakhoff is undoubtedly a skilled figure painter, able to capture classical poses ranging from contrapposto to the odalisque. Her work is also referentially rich, steeped in art historical modes. In one particularly poignant work, an erect, arched woman with globular breasts and buttocks careens towards the heavens; her figure is very close to that of the Venus of Willendorf. Malakhoff’s brushwork, even where contained to the borders of the body, is dynamic and sensitive, delineating veins and pocks that a lesser painter would cede, without indicating their full domain. Such is Malakhoff’s painterliness of suggestion. In the more frenetic works, lapis blue lines wrap into the background, traveling through lilac-mauve planes and daffodil strokes that drift beyond the edges of the body; paired with the more studied pieces, these still galvanize the artist’s study of flesh and poise. Malakhoff’s thorough-going leitmotif of the body canalizes a broader concern with emotional life and womanhood—concerns that, I maintain, we ought not simply reduce into idioms of bodily representation. Womanhood subtends the series though these works are not overtly concerned with the being of any entity; rather, they veer towards a sensitivity. Granting ready empathy to Malakhoff’s figuration, one must admit that she traipses the borders of the uncanny at times. Yet, even where ballooned, her corporal bodies also are never alienating figures. In fact, there is a beauty in them—not in their bareness, but in their poise, their teetering balance, their resplendent, supine repose.

Some of Malakhoff’s figure—particularly, the rightmost in a triad (two of whom are seated in stools)—are androgynized, a sea of purple-blue strokes pocked only by furrowed eyebrows and closed eyelids. One might here rejoinder that it is identity and not facture that the artist is centering. But, unlike, for instance, Saville’s Territories, Malakhoff’s subjects are not depicted in in-between stages of bodily alteration. Instead, the body overtakes any claim to identity beyond its groves. The body is the form of becoming, not something fully formed. At times, the artist’s figures curve the canvas into their own, repeated prostrate bodies set into a multiplicity such that the body is goaded into paint-strokes above all. It is less “femaleness” that comes apart at the seams here than claims to identity as such, flesh bleeding over the edges of the body, making the viewer unsure of limits of skin and self. Like Christian Ludwig Attersee, another expressionism-influenced artist, Malakhoff’s ‘all-too-fleshly subjects’ are their bodily distortions. Such excessive fleshliness does not read as deformation—there are no loose crusts and scabs of paint that lap into the surface of works; Malakhoff’s facture instead curves with the brush’s winding. There is ultimately a softness to Malakhoff’s studies, one that is closer to the expressionist tradition’s interest in the emotional becoming of a subject than her socialized semblance. It is in this sense that Malakhoff is a classicist.

(Text by Ekin Erkan)