I make paintings about the struggles of living under patriarchy. Through depicting women's bodies. I confront gendered prejudices about how women should look and act. posing questions such as how do we look at women. and what exactly constitutes womanhood 

Portland artists made up a full fifth of the 25 recently announced winners of the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s 2018 Painters and Sculptors Grants, which award an unrestricted $25,000 to each grantee. Only New York state had more winners than Oregon.

The five grant recipients are Addoley Dzegede, Lisa Jarrett, Elizabeth Malaska, Wendy Red Star, and Blair Saxon-Hill.

Best Curation: Russo Lee Gallery

The booth is not so much a joyful noise as a cryptic whisper among the fair’s cacophony.

In the six large paintings on view in Elizabeth Malaska’s exhibition (all works 2017), female nudes in strange interiors smoke, sleep, sob, or stare at smartphones. Shunning furniture, they sit, kneel, recline, or crawl on the floor. Most have cats, as witches have familiars. All appear to possess turbulent inner lives. Painfully distorted and conveying severe unease, the nudes arouse compassion, not desire, rebuking the art historical traditions from which they descend.

Elizabeth Malaska’s recent paintings celebrate the pathos and resilience of the anima, asserting its reproductive and spiritual power over millennia of oppression. At the heart of each work is a figure, or figures, embedded within a nonhierarchical matrix of oneiric visions, plants, decorative objects, and patterned surfaces.

When I got the chance to sit down with painter Elizabeth Malaska to discuss some of what I see in her new exhibition, Heavenly Bodies, at Russo Lee Gallery, I was moved by her intensity and congeniality. It’s an unlikely pairing, maybe, and that’s consistent with her work. Her canvases bear the historical past and the immediate present, and a wide-ranging research of art history and contemporary art grounds her subjects—it also frees them.

Though she [Malaska] names many contemporary feminist influences, her work embodies an uncanny marriage between Sylvia Sleigh and Marlene Dumas. The figures she champions are stargazers in both title and sentiment—unafraid to either dream or weep. The bodies she paints are heavenly in both politic and potential.ow to represent the female form through a keen understanding of figurative and iconographic complexity. Well-placed signifiers of women’s labor and leisure alike elevate her renderings to a thoughtful construction of her subject’s rich inner lives and motivations.

Elizabeth Malaska’s women are no longer bodies in space, but bodies taking space.

As in much of her work, in her new series of six paintings, “Heavenly Bodies,” Malaska depicts female figures in architectural spaces. But where in her earlier work these women drifted coolly in large, sparse, classically detailed spaces and sometimes melded with the patterned walls or floors around them, the grimacing women in her new work push forcibly to the front of their canvases. Writhing and contorted, they press against the edges of the paintings with curled, taloned feet. These women are barely contained.

How about the combination of G. Lewis Clevenger and Elizabeth Malaska at the Russo Lee Gallery? Clevenger’s acrylic abstract paintings lure the viewer with layers of shapes and lines and color that lead deeper and deeper, pulling on the viewer’s own looming memories of forms and lines. Malaska’s work combines various media, textures, and patterns, somewhat reminiscent of Matisse, except in her paintings, the female models are often armed and dangerous.

The desire to express a deep appreciation for an artist’s work while knowing that when it comes to writing about that work one feels somewhat out of one’s league… This may be the highest praise an arts writer can give an artist. 

A girl holding a sniper’s rifle in a basement with fake wood paneling. A woman wrapped in an American flag. A woman wearing mesh and holding a machine gun. For her newest show at Nationale, “When We Dead Awaken,” Elizabeth Malaska imagines the aftermath of a catastrophe–and presents the viewer with urgent, mysterious paintings that are unlike any post-apocalyptic images I’ve seen before.

Looking is creation—a political act. We make sense of the world through the meanings ascribed to what we see. I am concerned with hegemonic sight, which is often a tool of violent and destructive forces. My work disrupts such assured vision.

Though the women are solitary in Elizabeth Malaska’s When We Dead Awaken II, they are not alone. Instead, each appears to be many women at once, composed of multiple figures, a kind of palimpsest. Here, the wrecked bodies of women–those seen daily, cut up in advertisements and magazine pages and newspapers and crime dramas and high art’s canvases–have been reassembled, stitched, repaired. Wild-haired, many-armed, the women triumph. No matter what happened before, no matter who used to dominate these spaces, the painted worlds belong to Malaska’s women now.