For Art Basel Hong Kong, JTT is pleased to present six new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Becky Kolsrud. Kolsrud has devoted her practice to anomalous paintings of women, weaving together foreground and background to explore obstruction as self-imposed protective measure. Throughout her work, female gures interrogate the in nite and multifarious ways in which “woman” functions as sign, symbol, and allegory.

In this new body of work, Kolsrud enmeshes her imagined women within the con uence of two common tropes in her work: urban architectural elements and fantastical imagery of lush landscapes, thus bringing these two series into dialogue with one another. Here, the gate and the horizon are layered on top of one another for the rst time. Disembodied features and limbs emerge from expanses of water, clouds and earth. Geometric patterns overlay landscapes. Bathing nudes are partially obscured by the crisscrossing gates. The contour of a cloud mimics the contour of a body.

As in Kolsrud’s previous bodies of work, graphic patterns crisscross the surface of the picture plane. Beneath these “gates,” faces and body parts show through. The eye tries to connect all that might be hidden, but it is impossible to do so without disruptions and abbreviations. These “gates” are inspired by the security gates that protect many small businesses in the artist’s East Los Angeles neighborhood, but they represent a psychological border as much as a literal one. Paradoxically, the atness of these works provides a metaphorical site to explore layers of space, the space between outside and inside, and the distinction between public and private. What is behind (or in front of) the gates may be trapped, or the gates may be self-imposed. Simultaneously experienced, inside and outside threaten to slide into one another. And what is visible through the holes in the gates is held together merely through those gates themselves. Coherence seems to come only through constraint.

Another theme from Kolsrud’s past work that is present here involves what the artist refers to as “Allegorical Nudes.” In the art history canon, nudes and bathers are a common trope. These nude female gures are often viewed by an unnoticed gaze, inhabiting a pastoral scene of nature. Kolsrud’s allegorical nudes subvert these traditions along a number of dimensions. They show gures accompanied by bodies of water, but they are not really nude. Rather they are partially “clothed” by water or sky, which acts more as a wall or a large solid eld of color, thereby disrupting these bodies and the perspective of the scene.