To a woman, there is something completely ordinary, mundane even, about interacting with her wounded body. We tear open the skin of our shins with dull razors in the bath, cursing as soap and shaving cream seeps in. We pry open our bodies with our fingers to inspect the placement of IUD strings. We pierce and wax and pluck and inject—destroying and remaking ourselves over and over again with immense consideration of our own shortcomings, and little attention to the damage we do.

Sarah Slappey—a woman whose work single-handedly woke me up from my state of cultural malaise—is interested in exploding the dichotomy between the public and private spheres of womanhood. What we do in the dark, Slappey is not afraid of. The 40-year-old painter, based in Brooklyn, opened her brilliant new show, Bloodline, at the Bernheim Gallery in London on October 8. Slappey joins me on Zoom from a sun-drenched landing in a quaint, storybook-adjacent medieval village. She’s been in Europe since the show’s opening, she reports, and is very much looking forward to taking refuge from the chaos of openings and Art Basel (which she’s happy to be skipping) in Brooklyn for the next few months.

Women often build community based on shared pain—connective war stories, if you will. On a macro scale, we’re at war with expectation, with patriarchy. And on a micro scale, we’re fighting every out-of-place hair, every small betrayal to our perfection. Slappey and I have never met before. She doesn’t know me. And I don’t know her beyond the scope of her paintings. But we have an immediate understanding. We are already familiar with one another’s most intimate, grotesque bodily experiences. There’s something ancestral that lives in both of us—a story we all share of the outright violence and horror of being in a woman’s body. The fucked-upness of it all. A bloodline, perhaps? 

Slappey seems to agree. “Our bodies, our bodies in culture, our bodies in relationship to men, to pregnancy, to puberty, all of it. Like, there is this shared language,” she says. And there is; Slappey’s work is often read as “erotic surrealism,” but I fear those who interpret it as such are not fluent in our shared language. Every woman who walks through this show, I imagine, will feel the same twisting in her stomach that I did. Slappey’s depictions of the body are deeply realistic to us. Slappey confides, “It’s really hard to keep answering people’s questions about eroticism in my work because I just don’t see it in that way. And I keep wondering, in what context can we just look at unclothed bodies and not have to think about them as a sexual object—sexual beings in the midst of a sexual act.”

There’s so much that, as women, as the guardians of softness and femininity, we endeavor to keep quiet. Alone, in the unforgiving fluorescence of a ring light mirror, is where we do our most confidential work. But the Brooklyn-based artist is zooming in on these precious, personal moments. She uses distorting vantage points to simulate the experience of analyzing one’s own body. In “Pink Bath (Thank You),” we look from above at an entanglement of limbs, breasts, and a torso. The figure’s feet and hands are especially articulate, gesturing directly into my memory as a former dancer. Slappey, also a former dancer, is, like so many of us, irrevocably affected by her years at the ballet barre. “I think I just internalized this way of how bodies should move because of how I grew up,” she tells me of her adolescence spent in the dance studio, “learning about the right and the wrong way of moving my body to be beautiful.” It’s because of this personal history, her own involvement with the modified body, that she is compelled to implicate the viewer as well. We are all complicit, these paintings seem to say.

Almost like a one-way mirror facing the abyss of self-consumption, Slappey’s vantage points are simultaneously voyeuristic. “Like a woman being spied on,” she notes, recalling the first time she saw the infamous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho. This dichotomy she engages, between self-contained intimacy and the exploited body, is a crucial element of the show—the horror of which is complemented by the beauty of the statuesque in “Green and White Matrix” and “Green Tangle.”

Slappey abhors overly-saccharine feminine adornments. She tells me, “the micro modifications are where I bring in earrings and hairpins, things like that. I hate heart-shaped jewelry, for instance. I think it is so twee and childish,” later adding, “it’s really kind of insulting to women’s maturity.” The other side of bodily modification in this show is far less manicured but just as confronting. Rebar punctures the figures or confines them in a matrix. Though painful, there’s something wildly beautiful in the vulnerability it represents. “There’s something that is interrupting [the figures’] otherwise lumpy, bumpy, supple perfection. And this is just the clearest metaphor that I can come up with for how, to me, it feels to be in a body. Like you’re wearing pants with a waistband that’s too tight or you have marks left on your skin from a bra, right?” 

In a sense, what she gives to her paintings, Slappey must then take from her own body. Joining a canon of contemporary female artists and filmmakers exploring the margins of the modified body, Slappey describes the great physical toll that painting these figures can take on her. On giant, outstretched canvases, every brushstroke is effortful (especially when she’s lying on the floor and the brush is taped to the end of a yardstick). It’s not until the very end that she embellishes with blood. The artist describes it as cutting into the bodies, not as painting them. With a brush that resembles an X-acto knife, Slappey animates the figures, and, in a way, they become one. She relinquishes control in that moment, and allows the iron-rich paint to flow without her brush’s intervention, only using her hand to wipe it across the canvas as she would her own thigh. She shares, “it also feels like I’m creating my own body and then, like, destroying it in a way.”

To me, that’s what distinguishes Slappey’s work. The sublime in art should generate a wholly embodied response in the observer. It should wake us up. These days, so much art is ambient, experienced, yes, but not deeply felt. Bloodline puts its viewer on a bullet train towards emotion. Slappey says with conviction, “People are repulsed by repulsion and they don’t want to spend time with it. I’m delighted by repulsion.” Spending time with Slappey’s work is not just time spent repulsed, however. It’s time spent in active contemplation. And the artist understands, better than most, that the sublime is both terror and awe, infiniteness and ephemerality together.

She knows that, from the ideal body to the deviant body, corporeality is not fixed. We age, sag, and change—and to be truly embedded in the human experience is to hold both the grotesque and the beautiful at once.

Written by Anna Ely