February 6, 2025
Elizabeth Tremante
Final Girls
Serious Topics
January 4 - February 8, 2025

Elizabeth Tremante
What would happen if art masterpieces came alive? If the bleeding Renaissance depiction of Christ on the cross actually spewed blood into the gallery? Elizabeth Tremante imagines these situations. Her evocative and often unsettling but still quite humorous paintings draw from art history, yet rather than reproducing iconic artworks as an homage, she alters them in subtle ways, often illustrating how the people depicted in the works might emerge from the confines of their canvas boundaries, as well as their art historical genres.
Tremante creates amusing scenarios that juxtapose museum or gallery interiors filled with historical and contemporary artworks with a range of female visitors: teens, mothers, families, as well as disabled, nude or pregnant women. In some pieces, they take on characteristics or expressions from the paintings on the walls while in others they appear to do their own thing — paint or practice yoga — completely ignoring the context and content that surrounds them.
In an online interview, Tremante discusses taking her six year old daughter to a museum only to realize they were in the midst of artworks predominantly made by men where women were represented as vulnerable, or objects of desire and violence. Often these depictions featured naked or fragmented bodies, something that was difficult for a six year old to understand. Tremante decided to reinvent this narrative in her own canvases and create scenarios where people who visit exhibition spaces play off the paintings on view.
For Trios (2024), the artworks as well as the visitors to the space are grouped in threes. Here, Tremante paints a room in a museum where both contemporary and historical works of art hang on the wall. An altered version of Roy Lichtenstein's Brushstrokes (1965) is juxtaposed with a Renaissance style painting of three women seated at a table in front of burgundy drapery. In the foreground a pregnant woman stares at a sculpture based on the Three Graces. In another room seen through an arched doorway, a painting of the Virgin Mary with child and two angels hangs on a wall. A woman in a wheelchair studies the composition. Below the Lichtenstein, red paint drips onto the gallery wall and floor where a girl sits with a bruised knee, her blood matching the red hues of the painting. To the right, a woman contorts her body in a difficult yoga pose. Scattered around her are the contents of her purse, which includes opened red lipsticks that have traced red lines across a terrazzo patterned floor.
The center panel in the frenetic triptych Short Breath Tight Chest (2023) illustrates numerous unconnected visitors to a vast museum space. Here, Tremante paints a melange of artworks ranging from classical to modern sculptures, including an abstracted Giacometti woman and Brancusi's Bird in Space. The paintings installed on the walls include a color field work (presumably by Ellsworth Kelly), as well as Renaissance and Cubist pieces. Also depicted is a painting of a crucifixion where Christ's wound spurts an arc of red blood that puddles on the floor near the Brancusi. Surprisingly, none of the museum visitors appear to be looking at the artworks but rather are otherwise engaged — one young woman with a green face stares at the ceiling. A mother cares for her crying child. Another woman reads on a bench, her shoes off, oblivious to the simply drawn naked figure on the bench beside her. To the left and right of the center panel, Tremante moves in closer. On the left a woman has set up an easel in front of Manet's Young Lady (1866) and begins to paint it. The bird in the original is positioned as if sitting in the woman's hair. A nude pregnant woman rendered in a cartoony style stands at the left edge of the work. In the right panel, two girls examine a copy of the Marjane Satrapi's book Persepolis, indifferent to the sculpted heads and painting of a naked woman behind them.
All of this is in good fun, but also purposeful and poignant. Tremante reimagines museum interiors as public space open to all audiences and activities. She indulges in depicting intimate and private moments — nose bleeds in One Day After School (2023) — as well as playful reactions to the paintings. In The Loose Tooth (2024), a young girl holds a tooth in an open hand out toward her mother. A line of blood spills out of her open mouth. The painting in the background depicts three scantily clad women looking down on the scene. In her works, Tremante explores the relationship between the people who visit the museum and the artworks installed. She infuses new perspectives, expressions and attitudes into images from art history to better connect these painted figures to the now.
Click here for Elizabeth Tremante on its own page.