Tara Downs

Presentation Details
Tara Downs’s group presentation will address female sexuality and its mediation through imagery in new works by Darja Bajagić, Jacqueline Fraser, Marie Karlberg, and Catherine Mulligan. Bajagić’s richly stratified compositions contrast tropes of Western beauty with images of gendered violence culled from fan-gore, true crime, the dark web, and religious iconography. In amplifying cultural tendencies towards brutality and perversity, she clears a space in which to explore contemporary moralism. Fraser’s collages and assemblages likewise tackle the violence and virality of visual culture. An ongoing series of installations, The Making of, deconstructs selected films, a process driven by her wilful overexposure to cinema while she works in the studio. Karlberg parodies the cool conceptualism of the leading male painters of the 1990s and 2000s, such as Wade Guyton, Albert Oehlen, and Christopher Wool, in replica canvases stamped with gouache prints of her own ass. Mulligan’s uncanny paintings of “monstrous” womanhood draw equally from the language of art history and the distortion of digital imagery from fast fashion advertising and pornography.

About the Gallery
Tara Downs is dedicated to presenting developments in contemporary art for audiences worldwide. The gallery supports a roster of international artist at all stages in their careers, and hosts forward-thinking, multigenerational programming at its distinctive Broadway location. Beyond this, Tara Downs alsopromotes large-scale exhibitions, interdisciplinary projects, and collaborations by its artists in museums, biennials, and other exhibition platforms