Review by Alan Artner, Tribune art critic
Published in Chicago Tribune (November 9, 2007)

"Painterly figures with an edge of feminine mystery."

"Rose Freymuth-Frazier is a figurative painter in her late 20s who has studied with Steven Assael and Odd Nerdrum. Her large solo exhibition at the Ann Nathan Gallery indicates she combines the contemporary subjects of the former with the backward-looking romance of the latter while attempting to give a feminist spin of her own.

Most of the oils on view are portraits of young women. They sport tattoos, wear provocative clothes and toy with props, such as handcuffs and a baseball bat, that suggest sexual provocation and violence. The artist has written that she is interested in the "mythology, objectification and subjugation of women."

Freymuth-Frazier conveys the mythology by making her women look like odalisques and femmes fatale from past epochs. The objectification presumably comes across through a style of presentation frequently indistinguishable from 19th Century pictorial titillation and 20th Century art of the pinup. The subjugation of women is not apparent in the work on view unless one sees the poses of self-assertion and tease as attempts to break out.

The artist's style is relatively soft and romantic, even theatrical, when her themes would seem to demand a harder, more objective approach. So the pieces sometimes look like what the artist declares herself against, and one cannot be sure if she wants to go further than words to make the paintings' style as edgy as the distractions of their content."

-Alan Artner, Chicago Tribune, November 9, 2007

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