Allison Zuckerman - Encrypted Bather, 2018

To look at this painting is to experience the sensation of simultaneous
recognition and overload. At the centre, a female figure — reclining, partly
nude, partly composed of elements borrowed from at least four centuries of
Western painting — holds her ground amid a field of colliding visual
information. Her face, rendered with the volumetric warmth of a Rubens muse, is
crowned with a wreath of gold. Around her neck, a jewelled necklace; in her
lap, a Cézanne fruit bowl, its grapes and pears painted with the muted
naturalism of the post-Impressionist studio. To her left, a Disney bluebird
lifts off, cheerful and incongruous. Above, Monet water-lily passages fragment
into pixelated blocks, as if a broadband connection has briefly failed.
Scattered across the composition, further pixelations censor nothing in
particular — a shoulder, a stretch of background, a bird — their arbitrariness
the point.

The title gives you the interpretive key: encrypted. Encryption is the
process of encoding information so that it can only be decoded by those with
the correct key, rendering the readable unreadable without destroying its
content. This is precisely what Zuckerman does to the history of the female
nude. The figure is not hidden but she is scrambled — reassembled from so many
conflicting pictorial traditions that no single male gaze can fully claim her.
The bather of Cézanne, the odalisque of Ingres, the Venus of Cranach: all are
present, all are disrupted. The pixelations, drawn from the language of online
censorship, mock the gesture of concealment even as they perform it. She is not
modest. She is not available. She is encrypted.

The technical means by which Zuckerman constructs the image are as
conceptually loaded as the image itself. She begins in Photoshop, building a
collage from fragments sourced through Google — the internet as an
inexhaustible art-historical archive — then prints the composition directly
onto canvas in archival CMYK ink before painting over the entire surface by
hand. The result is a palimpsest: the printed ground carries the structural
argument while the hand-painted passages add texture, warmth, and the evidence
of physical making. A Rubens torso receives Cézanne brushwork; a Lichtenstein
graphic element abuts a rendered hand. The image is simultaneously digital and
painterly, appropriated and authored, historical and insistently present.

Encrypted Bather in the Context of Zuckerman’s
Practice

Allison Zuckerman (b. 1990, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; lives and works in
Brooklyn, New York) received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012
and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, also
attending the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in 2011. Encrypted Bather
was made in 2018, the year of Pirate and Muse, her solo exhibition at
the Akron Art Museum — her second museum solo, organised with the support of
Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York, and one of the most substantial early
institutional presentations of her work. The Akron catalogue describes the
method precisely: “a Picasso head, Lucas Cranach torso, Richard Prince foot,
Cézanne fruit, Lichtenstein paintbrushes and Disney bluebirds comingle to
create a grotesque, unapologetic encapsulation of the absurdity with which
female figures have been depicted throughout art history.” All of those
elements are present in Encrypted Bather; it is a concentrated,
cabinet-scale statement of everything the larger canvases of the same year
argue at monumental scale.

The practice is built on a deliberately contradictory foundation.
Zuckerman describes herself as a pirate — a plunderer of art history who steals
without apology from a tradition that has, for centuries, made women the
objects rather than the makers of images. She recasts those objects. The female
figures in her paintings are not submissive, not idealised, not available for
fantasy: they stare back, they overflow their inherited contexts, they are
composed of so many conflicting male visions of femininity that the coherence
of any single one is destroyed. As Zuckerman has put it: “The women that I
depict are not objects. They are intimidating and forces to be reckoned with.
They refuse to be consumed.”

The pixelation is the practice’s sharpest formal device. Zuckerman has
spoken directly about its origins: “I experience most art through my iPhone or
computer screen. All paintings are pixelated because of this. And because I
utilise printing within my practice, pixelation is inevitable.” The painted
digital glitches serve multiple purposes simultaneously — they reference the
mediation of all visual culture through screens; they mock the arbitrary logic
of online censorship, which will flag a Rubens nipple while leaving violence
untouched; and they give the paintings their quality of always being slightly
unresolved, as if permanently buffering. In

Encrypted Bather, the pixelations fall on the figure’s torso, on a
stretch of the Monet background, on an entirely innocent bird — a randomness
that is the critique.

The Case for Acquiring Encrypted Bather for the Black
Square Collection

Zuckerman’s institutional trajectory from 2017 onward is unusually steep
and unusually well-documented. In 2017, the Rubell Family Collection — one of
the world’s most important and strategically influential private collecting
bodies — purchased 22 works from her first solo exhibition and invited her to
become their summer artist-in-residence, a placement that produced the
monumental works shown in her first museum solo, Stranger in Paradise. Vogue
named her one of “The Women to Watch” at Art Basel Miami Beach that year. In
2018, the Akron Art Museum organised Pirate and Muse. In 2019, the Herzliya
Museum of Contemporary Art in Israel mounted a solo. The following years
brought solo exhibitions at Kravets Wehby, Stems Gallery (Brussels), König
Galerie (Berlin, 2023), and the Rubell Museum (Washington DC, 2023). Her work
is held in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Nacional Museum in Madrid, the Rubell
Collection, the Jewish Museum of Australia, and the Pizzuti Collection, among
others.

The scale of Encrypted Bather — 40 × 30 inches, intimate relative
to Zuckerman’s larger canvases — makes it a work of singular density.
Everything the practice argues is present in concentrated form: the historical
plunder, the digital overlay, the pixelated censorship, the figure who looks
back without apology. It was acquired directly from Kravets Wehby Gallery, the
gallery that first represented Zuckerman and brought her to the attention of
the Rubells, and it comes from the most critically significant year of her
early career. For Black Square, it is a work that positions the collection at
precisely the intersection where the practice’s critical seriousness and its
cultural currency converge: a painting that holds its own in an art-historical
conversation as substantial as the market one.

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