Elizabeth Malaska, “Oracle,” 2024, oil and Flashe on linen-wrapped panel, 36 x 43 in.

On walking into the Street Gallery at UMOCA and seeing the paintings of Elizabeth Malaska for the first time, they just might appear—and there may be no more accurate word—grotesque. Consider “Oracle,” which is the closest to the entrance. Three women sit close, their backs to a table on which are set out a small statue of a horse, a flowerpot that resembles an inkwell and a large vase that somehow fails to connect to its shadow. Ah, but the women … the one on the left has no face, though on her bodice are faint images of a face and what might be a place setting. An unaccounted-for hand shows up at her side, while her own arm displays some strange textures. The woman in the center is perhaps the most normal, though her sleeve makes no sense. And the woman on the right, while she may suggest Mona Lisa, is the most well lit, allowing her facial asymmetry to be seen. (It must be said that some viewers will enjoy these images right from the first sight.)

There is also something about the way all this is painted that tells an experienced viewer it isn’t a sign of inadequate practice. Aside from the notice that this is the 2025 Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting exhibition, there is the matter of control. Not only do the choices seem solid, but on advancing further among the nine paintings, four in one room and five in the other, there is incontrovertible evidence of Malaska’s gifts. For example, while her figures, all women, may be troubling, the animals that accompany them are often among the most exquisite work to grace this venue in some time. Further, the accessories that all-but overflow these interiors scenes are often equally well rendered. So the question might be, why the women? In the answer lies an explanation for why these inventions—and inventions is definitely the only word that fits here—are so necessary for this artist at this time, and arguably for her audience and the art of painting as well.

Elizabeth Malaska, “Delivered (Among the Meadow Grass),” 2022, oil, Flashe and pencil on canvas-wrapped panel, 60 x 48 in.

What if I were to argue here that among the paintings in Elizabeth Malaska’s Doctorow Prize exhibition, there is an elaborately painted metaphor that explains just what she means to do? And what if then I were to reveal that the work in question is an objective depiction of an adult woman emerging from the birth canal of a cow? What might come to mind at this point is that Malaska has described her art-making as an ongoing act of protest. In fact, the object of her protest is largely an expanded take on that of, for example, the Guerrilla Girls, whose posters and actions have done much to call attention to the inverse proportion of male artists and nude female models that characterize the history of art. Many  recent exhibitions of Contemporary art, especially those by women, have protested such social and physical abuses of women. But what makes Elizabeth Malaska’s approach so different?

Perhaps the most important thing to know about and so to see in her painting is her determination to resist anything and everything that is expected of her, whether as a player in the competition for status in art, as an artist caught up in the evolution of painting or as a painter who is simultaneously a woman. Her determination to resist will mean that just when we think we have Malaska figured out, she will disappoint the expectations that revelation leads to.

The second most important thing to know about Elizabeth Malaska is that she has acquainted herself thoroughly with art history: not just the art itself, but the history of its academic study, so that she routinely makes painted reference to the conflicts and dilemmas that academia has identified as problematic issues in art. Again, an example: in these paintings will be found an unusual number of grid-like backgrounds, some made up of the substance of the rooms her figures inhabit, others of decorative elements. These tease the eye into seeing space we know isn’t there on what we know to be a flat canvas. Sometimes she is content to disseminate with her brush for the audience’s pleasure, but, in other scenes, objects that appear round share the space with decidedly flat ones, challenging the viewer to choose, or else ignore. In “Oyster Eaters,” a woman reclines on an oval, braided rug, accompanied by the remains of her meal, a vase, a knife and a large cat, all of which are seen in perspective, yet fail to overcome the rug, which should lie on the floor but insists it hangs on the wall. It’s as if the conflict between representation and reality has been distributed among the component parts of the image. Such details play well alongside Malaska’s penchant for filling her visual field with quantities of decorative and suggestive details.

Installation view of Elizabeth Malaska’s exhibition at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, featuring her paintings “In the Shadow” (left) and “Those Who Were Sacred Have Remained So.” 

Surrealism looms particularly large among Malaska’s references, no doubt because it is itself an art that, like her, began in protest—against war, social inequality and other evils that are often properly associated with masculinity. Along the same lines, her figures often recall those of Picasso, a posthumously controversial male artist but also a crucial, early exemplar of breaking down the human figure in order to manipulate its orientation and function. “Breaking down” is a crucial action that played a large part in the late 19th-century advent of Modernism. What Malaska seems to realize is that it’s not enough to provide a non-sexist alternative for offensive cultural sexism. It is also necessary to dismantle the present state of affairs. Hence the destruction of what has come to be expected of art simultaneously with the provision of a new paradigm.

Malaska’s seeming refusal to ever offer a coherent, harmonically colored, or otherwise satisfying experience cannot be blamed exclusively on the social forces she pushes back against. It’s also necessary to accept that she doesn’t go along with the audience members who may fancy themselves her co-conspirators. She doesn’t even leave room for self-congratulation or her own satisfaction with a cohesive achievement, or perhaps some innocent scopophilia. The continuity here arguably runs from accurate images of a damaged world to incorrect images of a healthy world, often with both deficits in play at once. Then again, in numerous places, particularly in the animals, both the conception and the execution are so good it calls everything gone before into question. To that end, some credit is due to her choice of paints, primarily oils and Flashe, which is a water-based vinyl paint that produces intense colors with a matte finish that may also be responsible for the rusticated or unkempt quality of so many parts.

“All Be Your Mirror” may be the most complete assortment of Malaska’s signature treatments. The work is a diptych, neatly divided across the paint brush held by the artist on the left, while the model poses nude on the couch at the right. The dogs in the foreground exemplify the bravura technique that many of the canvases boast in at least one subject. The fabric of the couch is also splendid, as is the milk carton table behind the painter. What may be a Persian rug falls apart in front of the couch, as so many of her focal points do. What looks like a wall on the left is identical in every way but the woodgrain to the related area on the right, where it acts like a floor. It comes to mind that ambiguity may be one of the ways she boasts of what she is capable of doing.

The collapse and failure of the MeToo movement gives us a chance to observe how the artist denatures and domesticates the subject of the gaze. If, as has been suggested, “naked” means a specific individual, while “the nude” is idealized, Malaska’s women are both at the same time, and so neither one nor the other. In a work not present at UMOCA, there’s a naked woman whose skin trades identities with the wood grain on the wall behind her. Artists have no shortage of ways to remind us, the viewers, that the painted image is not reality. By declining to present convincing objects of desire anywhere in her art, Elizabeth Malaska levels the visual field among numerous attractive ideas that appeal to cognition rather than sensation.

Elizabeth Malaska, “All Be Your Mirror,” 2023, oil, Flashe, mica and pencil on canvas, 78×120 in.

Elizabeth Malaska: 2025 Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through January 3, 2026

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.