Flash Art Summer 351
June 4, 2025
The summer issue of Flash Art is devoted entirely to women artists who engage the grotesque not as an aesthetic flourish but as a critical methodology. Twisted, visceral, and unruly—the grotesque serves here as a shared language, even as these practices diverge in form, medium, and tone. It is not a style but a mode of inquiry: a way of unmaking coherence, unsettling the familiar, and insisting on that which resists containment. Whether it manifests as bodily deformation, psychological dissonance, or material excess, the grotesque offers a means of undoing smooth surfaces and polite meanings. It is an art of leakage, fracture, and transformation.
To give shape to this unruly terrain, the issue unfolds in three sections, each orbiting around a singular female artist whose practice redefined how we think about bodies, representation, and the ever porous boundary between inside and out: Cecily Brown (whose paintings blur the boundaries between flesh and abstraction, desire and decay), Kiki Smith (whose unflinching renderings of skin and organs merge the mythic and medical), and Pipilotti Rist (whose glitchy dismantling of the female image opens space for intimacy, humor, and erotic disorder). Drawn from the Flash Art archives, they serve as catalytic presences—provocations that inform, distort, or are purposefully misread by a new generation of artists.
The first cover story features Karla Kaplun, photographed in Mexico City by Luis Corzo in Kuboraum eyewear and Stone Island. In conversation with Caroline Elbaor, Kaplun discusses how her theatrical, baroque-inspired practice explores memory, power, and identity. Reflecting on cultural assimilation and the politics of desire, she uses the opera Carmen as a lens for examining how femininity and otherness are demonized. As she says, “It sounds like the history of femicide all over the world: I have to kill what you desire.”
Daiga Grantina is the second cover story, photographed wearing Paloma Wool in her Souppes-sur-Loing studio by Benedict Brink. In conversation with Amy Jones, Grantina reflects on the evolving trajectory of her sculptural practice across three exhibitions — from the sprawling “What Eats Around Itself” to the restrained “Temples” and the murky, metal-infused “Leaves.” The artist’s process is grounded in intuition, transformation, and a sense of time as material. She describes her method as spiraling: “When you can feel your heart slowly shrinking, the spiral is a space from which to grow.” The metaphor underscores her exploration of form, feeling, and fragility through shifting materials and poetic gestures.
The third cover story is dedicated to Alexandra Metcalf, photographed by Oscar Foster-Kane at The Perimeter, London, wearing Steve O Smith. Metcalf’s work blends gothic theatricality with piercing feminist critique, exploring themes of madness, diagnosis, and containment. Her layered paintings and sculptures evoke emotional paralysis and systemic oppression through ghostly figures, adolescent angst, and historical references like the “rest cure.” Informed both by feminine craft and masculine technique, her work blurs past and present crises in care. As Kyla McDonald writes, “the process of making is part of the narrative,” underscoring Metcalf’s vulnerability as resistance and creation as catharsis.
Also in this issue: “The Familiar Strange,” a visual essay by Phung-Tien Phan with an introduction by Ela Bittencourt; Bianca Stoppani reflects on Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s Grumpy as a surreal, feminist critique of techno-capitalist control, fragmented embodiment, and gendered visibility through grotesque digital forms. Leo Cocar explores how Lyric Shen’s ceramic and installation works blur boundaries between image, surface, memory, and materials, revealing a poetics of fragmentation and ambiguity grounded in bodily and architectural metaphor; Rachel Crowther and Ben Broome discuss her installation-based practice, focusing on scent, sound, surveillance, and sensory engineering to reveal hidden power structures and influences on human behavior; in conversation with Tosia Leniarska, Agnieszka Polska explores her use of seductive, media-driven storytelling to critique manipulation, emotional economies, and the technological influence of perception and memory across time; and finally, Eleanor Ivory Weber explores Olga Balema’s sculptural practice through Lacanian repetition, emphasizing how the artist’s works merge materiality with contingency and introspection.
For Critic Dispatch, P. Eldridge offers a visceral meditation on trans embodiment and the grotesque as revelation, defiance, and sacred rupture — where transformation becomes language, art, resistance, and prophecy of queer futurity. For The Curist, Fafaya Mogensen meets Andreas Führer, founder and director of Institut Funder Bakke in Silkeborg; the second installment of Studio Scene spotlights Sofia Defino Leiby with words by Gabriela Acha. Unpack / Reveal / Unleash, curated this year by Margaret Kross, features Sophie Friedman-Pappas. Focus On explores Zurich, with Tibor Beilicky and Ellena Ehrl guiding us through the city’s major urban projects.
By making these emerging voices dialogue with foundational figures, the summer issue does not proposing a linear genealogy. Rather, it tries to trace a series of mutations, misalignments, and aesthetic contaminations. The grotesque is, by nature, unstable; it resists taxonomy and thrives in contradiction, disrupting the clean lines of the images the clarity of the body, the fixity of meaning.
This issue doesn’t want to define the grotesque—it lets it spill and seep through the cracks.
