Blum & Poe, Los Angeles is pleased to present “Pictures Girls Make”: Portraitures, an exhibition bringing together over fifty artists from around the world, spanning the early nineteenth century until today. Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, this prodigious survey argues that this age-old mode of representation is an enduringly democratic, humanistic genre. 

In Martha Edelheit’s groovy scenes of erotic languor—featuring nudes in unselfconscious poses with intent or with distant facial expressions, usually basking in the sun—the pulsing undercurrent of optimism is most seductive. That, and the THC-Technicolor extravagance of her realist style. The ninety-one-year-old artist’s exhibition here, Naked City, Paintings from 1965–1980 which included several monumentally scaled works, spanned a period of social upheaval, when the artist labored with visionary feminist vigor. She rendered slack dicks and unidealized bodies in detail, holding the sexual revolution to its word in the realm of painting.

[Edelheit’s] figures achieve true transcendence in the real space of the city. . . . The frisson of a rippling deltoid foregrounding the unloveliness of crumbling infrastructure, as in “Major Deegan Expressway With Fruit” (1972-73), both sends up Western traditions and refreshes them.

For Edelheit, the city’s built environment is as spiritually revelatory as any desert. Bodies rendered in creamy pastels merge into a single mass before the seal enclosure, or dissolve into Central Park’s lake, becoming the landscape itself, a poetic depiction of art’s fundamental indispensability from life.

The wrenching, spiky and jagged forms in Martha Edelheit’s Sacrificial Portrait, and the frightening red and white gestures exploding against black in Sonia Gechtoff’s work, have all the attack and suddenness of a punch in the face. Corinne West, meanwhile, resorted to painting under the name Michael West. George (Grace) Hartigan and Lee Krasner, whose name was originally Lena, also felt it necessary to disguise their gender. It is no wonder women get angry.

Your list of must-see, fun, insightful, and very New York art events this month, including Ed Ruscha, Nina Katchadourian, Luis Camnitzer, Martha Edelheit, and more.

I am rooting for Martie Edelheit.

At the age of 91, she’s finally emerging from years of obscurity. Her mind is clear and her body agile enough to enjoy every small step of it all—a bustling opening, a post-opening dinner at the fashionable restaurant Il Buco—while leaning on a cane, or a friend’s arm. Small, fierce, outspoken, Martha Edelheit keeps pushing forward, with new 11-foot paintings and a planned return to New York City, her hometown.

I first encountered Edelheit in the context of another story, which explored the asymmetry of market acclaim for female artists based on the findings of the Burns Halperin Report.

As I wrote in December: “The overwhelming majority of women, especially women of a certain age, are ghosts as far as auction sales go. The reasons for this vary, from the market’s preference for painting over conceptual and performance art to lack of access to the gallery system to individual choices to slow artistic production during child-rearing years.”

The auction market for Pablo Picasso is larger than that for all female artists over the past 14 years.

Walls of flesh, walls of skin. I meet this at Galleri Larsen/ Warner, where I am overwhelmed by Marta Edelheit's paintings from the 1960s and 70s. Edelheit has lived in Sweden since the 1990s, but during the previously mentioned decades she was in the middle of the action, in New York's avant-garde art scene, in the city where she herself was born and worked for many years. Works from this period are now displayed in two small gallery rooms on bstermalm in what is Edelheit's first exhibition in Stockholm in a couple of decades. Sometimes her naked bodies are close, completely enlarged in a way that almost obscures what you look at: from the lines of the small pastel drawings, zoomed in almost abstraction, you can read the volume of a thigh, the folds of the vulva, the roundness of the buttocks. The color scale is strong, you could call it psychedelic, but I prefer to call it fruity: together with the more skin-friendly tones of peach, blushing inside, blue and green and yellow are found. A milky pink nipple is paired with the colors of an overripe banana. Edelheit's color management is phenomenal. In the drawings, it appears to be both inviting, tempting and a little repulsive. 

 Eyes that are sometimes closed, like closed in a sweet intoxication, sometimes turned away, sometimes angled straight towards the viewer. It is only when elements of voyeurism affect one. As in A View of Lake Atitian (1973) where the nickel-yellow woman in the armchair locks her eyes in one. In the other paintings, the painted ones are rather enclosed in themselves. In the kaleidoscope -linking form where the same person reappears at different angles on the same painting, a dreamlike dimension is added to these enchanted portraits. 

Figurative paintings by three Americans reflect the shifting social and sexual mores of the nineteen-sixties and seventies in this wonderful show, whose title is borrowed from a 1962 essay by Dore Ashton. 

This amazing Noho gallery is lighting up the past with the enormous “flesh wall” paintings of Martha Edelheit. Born in New York in 1931, she is still painting and, judging from what’s here, has one of the most mysteriously erotic-hot inner lives of any painter of the 1960s. Witness lounging female and male bodies and men with enormous erections performing acrobatics for women.

Martha Edelheit is yet another indication that 20th-century art history is still under construction, with large areas unfinished or invisible. Ms. Edelheit was included in last year’s “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965” at the Grey Art Gallery, which featured several artists unfamiliar to wider audiences. Now “Flesh Walls: Tales From the 60s” at Eric Firestone is devoted to Ms. Edelheit’s work from that era. She was part of the downtown, artist-run Reuben Gallery, where she had her first solo show in 1960. The “Flesh Walls” title is not metaphorical or accidental. Ms. Edelheit’s meaty, sexy paintings and drawings iterate tales of the sexually permissive ’60s. She approached the human body through the skin, inspired initially by the writings of the anthropologist Claude LeviStrauss, who suggested that the body was the original canvas for painting, in the form of tattoos. 

Whitechapel Gallery presents a major exhibition of 150 paintings from an overlooked generation of 81 international women artists.