Last week, many eyes were on Chappell Roan’s red-carpet ensemble at the Grammy Awards: a topless, diaphanous burgundy gown, of a piece with her burgundy-dyed tresses and suspended from her nipple rings. Even more absurdly, Heidi Klum wore a naked-looking rigid latex reproduction of her body, as though she hadn’t yet been released from the mold.
While daring red-carpet looks aren’t new, something strange is going on with the way the female form is being articulated in this cultural moment. In a recent article, New York Times critic Vanessa Friedman declares this “fashion’s new age of reconstruction” — an era marked by exaggerated femininity. Bustles and corsets, she says, are layered over the popular cosmetic medical procedures and especially GLP-1 weight-loss drugs that now allow us to alter not just our clothing but our actual bodies.
Elizabeth Powell, Jenny Kemp and Bonnie Morano seem to start with this conversation but push well beyond its boundaries in “Sensual Turns,” on view through March 13 at the Phoenix in Waterbury. All three painters work in abstraction, playing with formal aspects of composition, pattern and color; no figures are actually pictured. But Powell, who lives in Burlington and is also the show’s curator, nonetheless uses the opportunity to frame a dialogue about the body and how to construct it, absent its form.
Of the works on view, Powell’s are the most obviously concerned with the female body. With patterns and structures that look like they’re made from ribbons, lace and pearls, she references lingerie and the way it confines, shapes and reveals us. These materials read doubly as innards: bones, blood and the soft internal goo that actually holds us up.
Powell paints primarily in gouache, with teensy, careful strokes creating subtle, stepped color gradients. Because she works so consistently across the page, mapping the composition in graphite and applying a limited palette evenly with her tiny brushes, the works look digital unless seen in person. That effort is key to appreciating them; the paint on paper has a velvety texture in keeping with her sensual imagery.
Delicate visual effects also come through more clearly in person, especially in works such as “Gravitational Pull,” an ambitious 24-by-18-inch piece — larger than most in the show — that features a net of greenish pearls across a field of blue-white tumorous globules. In addition to the turquoise, ribbonlike forms that weave through it, the slightest shadow of a pattern overlays the composition, as though it were covered in lightweight mesh or lace. The effect adds a dimension to the image, creating space and depth.
Powell’s command of light and shadow is particularly strong in a trio of jewel-like 10-by-7-inch paintings. Shapes that aren’t quite hearts but recall them seem to glow in the all-red “Pulse”; bright turquoise catches the edges of dusky, lacelike forms in “Pull” and “Bind.” Navigating the darkness in these works, a viewer may not know if they’re looking at silk ribbons, wrought iron or viscera.
Morano’s paintings have an entirely different sensibility — there’s nothing resembling illusionistic shading here — but share some of the same elements found in Powell’s works, primarily a bodily symmetry and structure. On her website, Morano, who lives in Brooklyn, mentions both the belly button and the spine as important to her compositions. Many of the works are reflected around a central axis, though, like the body, none is perfectly symmetrical, giving them dynamic personalities.
Morano’s color palette is unusual, from the muted purplish-beige hues of “I will give” to the vibrant blues, lemon yellow, rust orange and lime green of “First Form.” Each of her little worlds makes its own internal sense but feels a bit bonkers. She builds tension with contrasts in color and texture: Large, bold, swirling brushstrokes make up confident tactile forms, but she also fills in sections with gloopier, more haphazard patterns. The seeming imperfections, especially within such an organized geometry, create a sense of vulnerability.
Kemp, who lives in Troy, N.Y., creates stylized, graphic paintings that bridge the distance between Powell’s and Morano’s. Using wide, curving lines separated by hair-thin ones, she creates neatly ordered, flat spaces. Yet works such as “Hip” nod toward the body. The symmetrical composition features lines suggestive of the bridge of a nose, the shape of a face or an hourglass waist; an expanse of fleshy pink tops a stack of ochre lines with a very subtle gradient, as though they were receding around a curve. In other works, such as “Hooked,” Kemp’s thin and thick lines are reminiscent of the sweeps and whorls on a head of hair.
In some of her paintings, Kemp invokes the feminine with color — not with Powell’s candy reds, but with a palette that somehow brings to mind a 1980s salon. “Tandem” pairs shades of peach with aqua; “Drape,” a range from vermillion to puce that wouldn’t be out of place in a lipstick display. Her works provoke questions about gendered associations and expectations we might not even know we have.
Two axes run through “Sensual Turns,” uniting the works on display. For all their precision, each of the works is a tactile experience of the painter’s hand and material: You can see the brushstrokes, the degree to which they’re flat or raised in ridges, the way the paint sits on a surface. And each showcases a measure of extreme control but not restriction. No one’s getting squashed into a corset or judged for the shape of their ankles. Instead, these artists create made-to-measure looks with abstract sensuality. ➆
This article appears in February 11 • 2026.
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