Review: Blood and Bodies, Mingled and Imperfect. Elizabeth Tremante at Spinello Projects (Miami, FL)

Elizabeth Tremante’s latest solo exhibition at Spinello Projects in Miami, Blood and Bodies, Mingled and Imperfect, is a comical and borderline maniacal exploration of institutional power and the murkiness of expectations placed on women through cultural and societal cues because of it—a suspending of decorum to interrogate it, poke fun at it, even. Through a series of oil painted vignettes on canvas ranging from small to standard scale, Tremante takes the allegory of perfection to task and flips it on its head. Or, maybe on its back. Unless it’s been projectile vomited, or mixed in with the blood left on the floor. It isn’t my blood, though it seems as if it’s supposed to be mine and history’s, together.

The paintings’ subjects are all female children with their mothers and caregivers, their bodies and faces contorted in response to influential artworks in Western history as reinterpreted by Tremante, which serve as subjects all their own. “[Their] actions in the galleries are performative and psychological. I think of them as acting out in different ways against the subtext of the artworks, the power dynamics, the authority of the architecture,” Tremante explains in an email. “I imagine different levels of control and repression that the characters express and experience in these scenarios.” At the gallery entrance, Women in Black (2022) is a jarring welcome, a recent painting emblematic of the exhibition’s allusion to there once being a fourth wall between the museum’s works and their viewers, and by extension, an invitation to demolish the one between Tremante’s offerings and oneself. 

Elizabeth Tremante. Girl-Catastrophe at the Ryman Retrospective, 2019. Oil on canvas. 33 × 33 inches.

The Los Angeles-based painter began this ongoing body of work in 2017, a project that isn’t unified by a title, rather the lilac walls of a museum of her own creation. Rendered from the artist’s absurdist-leaning imagination, where influences such as MAD Magazine comics and illustration, and her own complex relationships with artistry and motherhood, are tethered to biting commentary on the spectacle of art history and its warping of the female experience. Each scene has been intentionally under-painted with a delicate pink that verges on neutral; “I was looking for a color that would disrupt the upper layer of colors the most,” Tremante elaborated. This subtle fleshiness begs one to treat this imagined museum as a character of its own, tempting thoughts about whether institutions should be treated as living, breathing spaces, and the implications of doing so. Anthony Spinello’s curation is its own juxtaposition, mirroring the blueprint Tremante has laid out as if the gallery and the art are indulging one another. The Gesamtkunstwerk Building, where Spinello Projects resides, boasts an industrial and minimal design that doesn’t sterilize the open concept of the gallery’s space, but its sharp corners demand that the viewer roam rather than traipse though in case of whiplash when a work necessitates a double-take. For the record, they all do. One of Tremante’s most gut-punching works bides its time in a fiercely sunlit room in the back of the mostly windowless gallery, where heat seeps in and blood flies. 

The small, hot gallery in the back of the first floor of the Gesamtkunstwerk Building in Miami's Allapattah neighborhood. 

To the right of its archway is All Your Favorite Lucretias (2020), the central figure of which isn’t the titular reference, but a blushing, nervous little girl with her back to a blood-splattered gallery. Modestly dressed and, perhaps, avoiding a confrontation with the nebulous ferocity of what looms behind her, the child has encountered, for one, exactly what her own caregivers have warned her about. Standing in the warmth of the gallery, it becomes viscerally apparent that both the girl and Tremante are reeling from the impact of the ways in which women’s bodies and emotions have long been romanticized to the point of exploitation and furthermore, institutional desire to control both, in Western culture, regarded for nothing more than the aesthetic experiences produced because of them. “Many artists who paint [Lucretia] add to the misery by making her a bit titillating,” Tremante says of the parable, which may explain her decision to reinterpret a 1623 Artemisia Gentileschi painting, Albrecht Durer’s Suicide of Lucretia (1518), and Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Suicide of Lucretia (1529), with their nipples on display.

Elizabeth Tremante. All Your Favorite Lucretias, 2020. Oil on canvas. 23 × 27 inches.

Tremante’s Gentileschi presents an erratic, maddened Lucretia with her tongue hanging out of her mouth and a dagger pointed to the sky rather than her chest; a comparison of postures between this version and the original merits noting that All Your Favorite Lucretias humanizes Lucretia instead of further martyrizing her. Beside this is a reimagining of Durer’s, a gorier version whose bloodletting has escaped the canvas and transformed a little girl’s curiosity into a heavy reckoning, and while the piece isn’t one that has “gone too far,” the two, in addition to the reinterpretation of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s painting in the far background, can be explored as options women are granted by the powers that be—in this case, collective memory and those who keep its codes. Does a woman act with agency, does she get to participate? Or, as Virginia Woolf posited in her 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own, is a woman merely fodder for history? 

This question is central to Tremante’s investigation of spaces, museums specifically, wherein a certain level of purity and maturity is expected of its patrons to the point of making oneself a non-person, and her exploration of the duplicity of social expectations as they pertain to women and children. The blurring of boundaries between art and art-viewer in works like Return to Empire (2022) and “Marie Cheffer,” Little Known Portrait of Rodin’s Mother (2019), the proximity of an indignant mother and pristine abstract minimalist work made by a man in Girl-Catastrophe at the Ryman Retrospective (2019), and the quasi-grotesque defiance of  “propriety” in The Destroyer (2019) and The Bloody Nose (2021) against the backdrop of saccharine walls ultimately form a dialogue about the female experience, one that situates women and girls as not pretty and proper, but chaotic and imperfect, too.

Written by Maria Gabriela Di Giammarco for Sotheby’s Art Institute Certification in Art Writing, 2022.
Blood and Bodies, Mingled and Imperfect was on view at Spinello Projects from September 24–October 29, 2022.