Intimate yet exhibitionist

Emily Eveleth shares the process behind her monumental painting "Tsk" at Anderson Yezerski Gallery.

Emily Eveleth, “Tsk,” 2024. Oil, colored pencil, and metallic pen on Yupo, 127”x212”. Photo courtesy Anderson Yezerski Gallery. Process photos courtesy Emily Eveleth.

Emily Eveleth may be best known for her paintings of doughnuts: Gorgeous, fleshly and alluring, often frosted or sugared, plump, with orifices dripping with jelly. They’re sirens beckoning to the senses, teasing an utter abandonment to desire. What better medium than paint – so oozy, so tactile, so luscious – to embody pure sensuality?

Her monumental painting “Tsk,” on view in her show “In Silent Mode” at Anderson Yezerski Gallery, may come across as an epic retort to all that doughnut delight. Emily has been painting hands for years, too. Bare or gloved, holding things or gesticulating, sometimes dramatically lit like actors on stage, the hands command uncanny attention. The pink-gloved hands in “Tsk” are giant and scolding. Yet at that scale, with those undulating patterns and that dripping paint, they are hardly prim. Or maybe they’re performatively prim. Propriety can often be an armor and a cudgel. People loudly and publicly police others rather than attend to their own bruises and backgrounds. In this case, the background is a vibrant Lily Pulitzer.

Emily writes:

It‘s all Pontormo’s fault. Ever since I read Leo Steinberg’s analysis of Pontormo’s Capponi chapel in Santa Felicita I’ve wanted to do a show where paintings talk to each other from across the room.