MONICA MAJOLI
Born 1963, Los Angeles, California; lives in Los Angeles, California

Monica Majoli's figurative paintings from the early 1990s to the present have depicted scenes of sexual fetishism— painstakingly actuated self-portraits with dildos or claustrophobically populated representations of S&M encounters between men. But she focuses less on the transcription of physical experience than on the suggestion of its most obdurate, if ineffable, psychological aspects and ramifications. Investigating themes and rituals of identity, intimacy, and mortality, Majoli's work is both a site for catharsis and an admission of its irresolution. A painting such as Untitled (1990), a small panel showing a slice of a woman's scarred pelvis, paradoxically implies intractable psychic distance that is unmitigated by corporeal proximity.

SH

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Hanging Rubberman #3, 2004. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 51 x 96 in. (129.5 x 243.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection