<div>Janelle Zara looks at the three painters and their daring subversion of the figurative canon</div>

Angeleno painters Christina Quarles, Hayv Kahraman, and Trulee Hall are redefining the female gaze

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The male gaze, by now, is akin to pornography: You know it when you see it. In television, film and, of course, pornography itself, it’s the representation of women as one-dimensional objects of male sexual desire&nbsp;–&nbsp;passive creatures with no thoughts and no plotlines or desires of their own. Writing in the context of the movies, the film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term in her landmark 1975 essay,&nbsp;‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, but the phenomenon existed long before it had a name. In his 1972 miniseries,&nbsp;‘Ways of Seeing’, the English art critic John Berger had pointed out its existence in the art historical canon, particularly in the old masters’ treatment of the female nude.&nbsp;‘Her nakedness is not an expression of her own feelings,’&nbsp;he said.&nbsp;‘It is only a sign of her submission.’In present-day Los Angeles, the world capital of the entertainment industry, the male gaze prevails, but as female artists take the representation of women into their own hands, it’s a tradition ripe for subversion. In the colorful, psychosexual paintings of the multidisciplinary artist Trulee Hall, the female nude abounds in overtly yet oddly unseductive poses: gracelessly hunched over to expose the black circular voids of her fleshless genitals, or standing alongside other women in possession of fully erect penises. Rendered in Hall’s palette of complementary colors&nbsp;–&nbsp;shades of red on green, or deep cobalt blues with luminous golds&nbsp;–&nbsp;they emphasize the contradictory demands of the male gaze.&nbsp;‘We’ve been conditioned to be sexy, but not too sexy,’&nbsp;says Hall, whose work aims to strike a different mood:&nbsp;‘uncomfortable, somewhere between embarrassing, awkward and sexy.’&nbsp;

At the heart of Hall’s work, which also includes sculpture, CGI and, more, is the subjects’ acknowledgment that she’s being watched.&nbsp;‘It creates a tension between the seer and the one being seen,’&nbsp;Hall says. Her figures engage in a type of performance, in some cases donning the costumes of expected sexual clichés&nbsp;–&nbsp;the angelic virgin, or her counterpart, the dark seductress. Meanwhile, the male gaze looms in the form of phallic ears of corn, or the sinister figure in a trench coat, conjuring the threat of physical violence.In the art of fellow Los Angeles painter&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8630/Hayv-Kahraman" target="_blank">Hayv Kahraman</a>, the female performance speaks to a sense of alienation: Her work that debuted at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1267/Jack-Shainman-Gallery" target="_blank">Jack Shainman Gallery</a> in September depicts women literally bent over backward,&nbsp;‘contorting themselves into various positions that seem to be very passive, or even submissive and humiliating,’&nbsp;Kahraman says.&nbsp;‘The strength there is how she’s looking back at you.’The subjects’ piercing gaze is attached to bodies with the same porcelain skin and rotund curves of a Boticelli nude,&nbsp;‘a decoy,’&nbsp;Kahraman says, where she’s taken a standardized notion of beauty and added the dark hair and thick eyebrows stereotypically ascribed to Arab women. For the Iraqi-born artist, another consequence of art history’s Eurocentric male gaze has been the conflation of beauty with whiteness.&nbsp;‘We’re so accustomed to seeing that aesthetic and thinking that’s what’s beautiful,’ says Kahraman, who studied graphic design in Florence but spent the majority of her time with painters who were schooled in Renaissance painting. ‘When I look back at that time, I realize there was no regard for anything that pertained to an other, or even my own history.’

In contrast to the inherent obviousness of the male gaze, the concept of a female gaze still eludes concrete definition&nbsp;–&nbsp;no doubt due to the complexity of the female experience. Putting the perspective of an entire gender in a box seems plainly counterproductive, as seen in the paintings of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/22486/Christina-Quarles" target="_blank">Christina Quarles</a>, whose work disrupts the concept of binaries altogether.&nbsp;Her visual language melts the body into abstraction, as figures loosely defined by washes of color lock their fluid limbs into a tangled embrace. Their bodies possess an ambiguity, owning both or neither identifying markers of sex. They flow from one set of the canvas’ defined planes onto another, resisting the confines of any boxes or categories.To an artist born to parents of two different races and who identifies as queer, this approach to the body speaks to a lived experience.&nbsp;‘I believe we all find ourselves contorting and compartmentalizing our total selves to adhere to the expectations of a set of fixed identity positions,’&nbsp;Quarles says. In her world, the self is fluid.&nbsp;‘This is a sort of self-reflexive gaze, and I do not associate it with any one gender,’&nbsp;she concludes. To look inward is to cease this performance, regardless of who might be watching.

Hayv Kahraman is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1309/Vielmetter-Los-Angeles" target="_blank">Vielmetter Los Angeles</a> and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1267/Jack-Shainman-Gallery" target="_blank">Jack Shainman Gallery</a>, New York City. Christina Quarles is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1424/Pilar-Corrias" target="_blank">Pilar Corrias</a>, London and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1256/Regen-Projects" target="_blank">Regen Projects</a>, Los Angeles.Top image: Christina Quarles, photographed by Evan Bedford. Courtesy of the artist;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1424/Pilar-Corrias" target="_blank">Pilar Corrias</a>, London; and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1256/Regen-Projects" target="_blank">Regen Projects</a>, Los Angeles.This article was originally published in Art Basel Miami Beach&nbsp;Magazine, which will be available in select locations in the US from November 20th 2019 onwards.

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Janelle Zara looks at the three LA-based artists and their daring subversion of the figurative canon


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Janelle Zara looks at the three LA-based artists and their daring subversion of the figurative canon