Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Chicago-based Em Davenport is a Gen-Z-er, still in her twenties, yet her solo show “love,” held over at Galerie Nicolas Robert, reveals a knowing old soul, hip to what got us here. Virtually all her novel paintings radiate the sardonic epiphanies of 1970s women, cued by their titles and brought home by their execution. Constrained and not quite defiant, they’re like characters in the New Hollywood films of Altman, Ashby, Cassavetes, Nichols, Rafelson, and Scorsese – acknowledging, a shade passively, a degree of deference to condescending male-gazers. One grim suggestion is that this generation’s incarnation of the counterculture could, despite the fire lit under it, turn in on itself as its forerunner did.
In her lover (goodbye naivety, my sweet niche), her master’s voice, girlfriend, and the guru, the serene subjects are truncated at the top edge, not quite seen as women-in-full despite their seriousness and attentiveness. And, with exquisite pitilessness, salome (I was born to wear a minidress and play the tambourine for you baby) wreaths an amorphous young woman in the resolute domesticity of a tablecloth. beautiful losers, though, illuminates not abject resignation but the frustrating allure of settling. LP Drawing (FACTORY SEALED), one of Davenport’s deftly simulated album covers on paper, says a lot: hardwiring is tough to rip out.
2025, oil on tablecloth, 37 x 48 inches
paper on panel (LP) with frame, 12 x 12 inches
graphite and paper on LP with frame, 12 x 12 inches
The line and color in Davenport’s work are casual, even raffish, not unlike New York artist Whitney Claflin’s if less abstract. These qualities operate similarly in fixing cultural and psychological phenomena for examination while registering their elusiveness. It’s ironic yet fitting that “love” was up when Gloria Steinem went down. She might have appreciated Davenport’s candid recognition of thwarted feminism as well as the unflinching light she shines on the way romantic love and other emergent preoccupations can function – pragmatically or tragically, depending on your point of view – to impede the revolutionary life and keep a person liminal or, worse, subdued. The faceless female portraits in LP Drawing (you & me against the world) co-opt Helen Reddy’s eponymous post-I Am Woman cri-de-coeur. But the piece tracks as a work unfinished as opposed to unfinishable. Stay strong.
“Em Davenport: love,” Galerie Nicolas Robert, 4653 Boulevard Saint-Laurent, Montreal, Quebec. Through September 12, 2026.
About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
