Julia Kowalska at Steve Turner

Julia Kowalska, To Give to Eat or to Allow Oneself to Be Eaten (2024). Oil on canvas, 39.5 x 47.25 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner, Los Angeles.

An unsettling sensibility permeates Julia Kowalska’s Secrets Of Our Loves, on view at Steve Turner. Inscrutable figures glow radiantly within domestic interiors and gardens in some paintings, while others capture a water droplet, a bed bathed in red, and a lamb’s mouth. Kowalska writes that the works were “born under the cover of night,”¹ a time when love’s passions most sharply puncture the heart. Despite the simultaneous cliché and profundity of such emotions, Kowalska paints them as though they were distant and minor: through humanoid forms, hazy facture, and low-contrast color schemes. These stylistic choices reflect an internal world that is mediated, caught between the personal and the strange.

In Kowalska’s images, emotions are both heightened and distanced, delegated to increasingly nonhuman forms. In To Give to Eat or to Allow Oneself to Be Eaten (all works 2024), a figure crawls on the grass under a starry night like an animal. Kowalska’s short, repetitive brushstrokes resemble fur blanketing the figure’s body, drops of liquid shoot out her breast, and one of her hands curls like a paw. The awesome porousness of the boundaries characterizing love or infatuation is both life-giving and self-dissolving, a duality that finds one expression in this work.

Similarly, in Chew, Swallow, Let This Joy Last, Kowalska mediates individual feeling through an iconic Christian image—a close-up of a lamb’s masticating mouth—invoking the lamb’s association with Jesus’ sacrifice for humankind. This imagery suggests that personal feelings of devotion and surrender to a lover can feel magnificent, historic, and even divine in magnitude, rather than privately or individually held. At the same time, this particular image of devotion, cropped as to swallow the viewer in the lamb’s fur, highlights consumption both in title and composition. Love seems to be both private and universal, affirming and dissolving—a paradox of interiority and exteriority expressed through Kowalska’s figures.

These creaturely forms emerge only through a persistent fog. Within each composition, viewers confront figures that are both of our world and of another. Skin on the Chest Starts to Glow depicts a nude figure from above, lying in a grass and dandelion field, a stereotypical site of lovelorn reverie. His features are blurred and indistinct, but his skin emanates a green light as though it were phosphorescent. The sting of melancholy or the jolt of limerence channeled by Kowalksa’s figures are available to our eyes only at a remove, much like the gauzy, nostalgic quality characteristic of old film technologies or the romantic pictures that emerge from a greasy smartphone lens.

Kowalksa’s self-consciously hazy style plays with how our emotions are shaped by the media we express them through. Indeed, the glow of a phone screen and the look of its pictures seem integral to Kowalska’s aesthetic. In Warm, Salty Forehead, for instance, a lustrous figure holds their hands up to their face as if the image were an out-of-focus photo of an unwilling subject. Part of the tension between the intimate and the estranged in Kowalska’s work therefore articulates a tension present in our everyday lives. Our feelings are often captured by our devices as soon as we feel them, either experienced vicariously through another photo, another video, another song—or experienced already at a remove, with the camera lens turned on ourselves. Regardless, the threat of consumption lingers.

Julia Kowalska: Secrets of our Love runs from March 16–April 13, 2024 at Steve Turner (6830 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90038).

Julia Kowalska, Secrets Of Our Loves (installation view (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner, Los Angeles.

Julia Kowalska, Skin on the Chest Starts to Glow (2024). Oil on canvas, 47.25 x 71 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner, Los Angeles.

Julia Kowalska, Warm, Salty Forehead (2024). Oil on canvas, 55 x 47.25 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner, Los Angeles.

Julia Kowalska, Secrets Of Our Loves (installation view (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner, Los Angeles.

Julia Kowalska, Chew, Swallow, Let This Joy Last (2024). Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 31.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner, Los Angeles.

Julia Kowalska, Skin (2024). Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 39.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner, Los Angeles.

Isabella Miller lives and works in Los Angeles.

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