Laura Krifka’s Wickedly Deviant The Game of Patience

at Luis De Jesus (through October 26)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Laura Krifka enjoys doing things she is not supposed to do. Having absorbed the tenets of neoclassical painting, she bypasses high-minded seriousness by adding a candy-coated veneer of hyper-artificiality adopted from 1950s MGM musicals to the domestic decor of private scenes she undercuts with a deviant sexual subtext recalling David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. This irresistible mix of dexterity, decor, decorum and deviance makes viewing her paintings a guilty pleasure — rather like sneaking into a peep show or secretly spying on neighbor’s forbidden acts. We can view the conventions of art, cinema and domestic life through a bemused female gaze with no-holds-barred on taking delight in human foibles.

Krifka belongs to a new wave of young female figurative painters who are trending because they are pushing figurative painting forward by rewriting the dominant narrative from a non-binary point of view. There is a lot of buzz around the way this technologically savvy generation is invigorating figuration with more contemporary cultural references. Krifka is on the cutting edge of this trend because her distinctive painting style is both historically grounded and current. Although she has impressive painting chops, she refuses to take herself too seriously, which makes her wry humor all-the-more infectious.

Krifka developed an affection for taboo subjects after her nice Christian family…