Girls will be Girls

Emma Hapner: Girls Will Be Girls offers fantastical portraits of beauty and danger shown suspended in an innocuous, cotton candy dream world. Hapner’s nudes emote various psychological states, from introspection to mania. Her meticulously composed figures adopt tantalizing poses in works such as “I’m Not Like Other Girls, I’m Much Worse.” The pose of the centrally-placed figure, referencing the Greek Myth of Narcissus, stares at another version of themselves. Nude except for a pair of boots, the figure dominating the scene evokes desire and self-examination in equal measure.

Hapner’s balance of seduction and tension, depicted surrounded by saccharine sweet orange and pink hues, recalls the female gaze of empowerment in considering both the compositional style of Renaissance imagery and contemporary portraiture in the vein of contemporary artists such as John Currin. Hapner pays careful attention to expressions, which she portrays delicately along with a detailed attention to curvilinear composition and volume.

In a social media-obsessed world of selfies and filters, Hapner’s paintings of feminine empowerment exude a raw sense of honesty, revelation and self-awareness. Multi-dimensional and introspective, the inevitable sensuousness of Hapner’s paintings ultimately reveal that self-perception forms a potent means of determining what is enticing, what is dangerous, and what hovers evasively between the two.