New Talent: 6 Queer Figurative Painters Reimagining Intimacy

Willa Chasmsweet Wasserman: Figure with vase and seashell, 2021, oil on blackened steel with hardware, 11 in diameter.

To avoid subsuming subjects into her own worldview, Willa Chasmsweet Wasserman paints using certain techniques that restrain her vision. Working in the dark, she draws with brass wool or observes her subjects using a convex security mirror that flops and distorts their appearance. Regarding the forced haziness of the resulting images, Wasserman has said that these techniques are “a restraint against my own bullshit.” In her paintings, it is difficult to discern a figure’s face or gender. The Los Angeles–based artist will open her first New York solo show, “chasm sweet,” this September at Downs & Ross.

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger: Sappho, 2019, oil on canvas, 29½ by 70 inches.

In her works shaped like altarpieces with panels on hinges, the Mexico City–based Frieda Toranzo Jaeger often paints lesbians having sex in driverless cars. Automobiles without drivers fascinate Jaeger, who sees them as a symbol of the future—one she wants to claim as a queer space. Typically, these paintings also include embroidered elements. Her family is trained in Mexican embroidery styles, and she often enlists them to help produce these pieces. For her current Baltimore Museum of Art show, “The Perpetual Sense of Redness,” on view through October 3, she incorporated the technique in order to insert “an Indigenous tradition into a Western one,” as she put it in an Art in America interview.

Ambera Wellmann: Nosegaze, 2020, oil on linen, 27½ by 23½ inches.

Wellmann’s figures often appear more like swirling masses with a few distinct body parts poking out—one lover seems to meld with another, and sometimes it’s hard to tell just how many people are present. The Canadian–born, New York–based painter lends her canvases a certain sheen using delicate, deliberate touches of white paint. Her finished works retain a palpable sense of paint’s liquid nature and capture the rawness of desire. Her solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Arts Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is on view through August 8.

Sasha Gordon: Campfire, 2021, oil on canvas, 64 by 113½ x 1½ inches.

In her first solo show, held earlier this year at Matthew Brown gallery in Los Angeles, Brooklyn-based artist Sasha Gordon presented skillfully rendered moments of self-discovery from her youth. In her paintings, Gordon aims to think through the dynamics she experienced growing up as a queer Asian girl in a white, upper middle-class New York suburb, where “everything I did felt like I was performing for men,” as she once said. Two works in the Matthew Brown show, Pond Lovers (2020) and Campfire (2021), show a pair of young women skinny dipping together, capturing the excitement that is unencumbered youthful romance.

Jonathan Lyndon Chase: Video Vixens, 2020, acrylic, oil stick, marker, collage, and spray paint on muslin, 72 by 60 inches.

The Philadelphia-based painter’s brightly colored and loosely rendered portraits of queer Black people depict pleasure in all its complexity. At times, the works bear traces of violence. “As someone living with bipolar disorder,” Jonathan Lyndon Chase once said, “it’s really important for me to talk about that full complex range.” Still, the painter is careful not to spectacularize anti-Black violence. “Whether in lynching postcards or on Instagram, there are too many images of our bodies just being paraded around.” Chase is also intent on making their art accessible to a broad audience, citing Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, and Henry Taylor as influences in that regard.

Jenna Gribbon, Tenderness and Trust, 2019, 8 by 10 inches, oil on Linen.

Jenna Gribbon, who was born in Tennessee and lives in Brooklyn, has made dozens of paintings of her fiancée, the indie musician Torres. In her paintings, the artist seeks a mingling of “motherhood, sexuality, humor, and the everyday, since we often act as if we have to relegate separate parts of ourselves to these things, which is a bit absurd,” as she told Art in America in 2019. Her subjects have neon nipples that are impossible to miss. The move to highlight that part of her figures’ bodies is a playful effort to make viewers self-conscious about their gazes.