The painting that shares the title of this Brooklyn artist’s gallery debut (“Loose Ankles”) depicts two pale-pink feet clad in yellow-and-black heels. Cut short at the ankles, they’re bound together with rope, while a disembodied hand, also tied up, emerges between them, holding a smoking cigarette. The picture, modestly scaled and rendered with clean lines and flat colors, evinces several of Caitlin Keogh’s primary strategies and themes, including a quasi-Surrealist cut-and-paste approach to representing the body and its continued relevance in contemporary art.
In other paintings such as Correspondences and Wuthering Nephron, Keogh brings the biological and the decorative into striking combination, recasting the body’s concealed interior as a forum for exploring femininity and self-projection. It may sound like heavy going, but the visual effect is anything but.
Keogh’s cartoonlike pastel-tinted aesthetic and nimble manipulation of image and composition result in pictures with the playfully intriguing feel of games or puzzles. Works like Renaissance Painting, in which a cluster of hormonal glands adorn a suit of armor, thus become enjoyable tests of our ability to find and forge connections.