Kathe Burkhart

A selection of Kathe Burkhart’s “Torture Paintings” (1992–2001) are on view at Schroeder Romero in Brooklyn, but if you want a primer on Burkhart’s aesthetic and invective, this is the place to start. The bulk of the works feature Liz Taylor, who serves as both a post-feminist icon and the artist’s alter ego. Rather than the typical vision of a progressive feminist, Burkhart offers Taylor—she of the multiple marriages, plastic surgeries, and religions—as her own model of the modern woman: a gorgeous, fucked-up, diva mess. Crudely drawn scenes of Liz cribbed from cinema classics like Suddenly Last Summer, Giant, and Cleopatra are paired with crude stenciled-on texts like “Fuck You,” “Slit,” and “Eat Shit.” In the same way that Joan Crawford and Judy Garland—talented women scarred by lives of baroque excess—serve as gay icons, Liz, Burkhart suggests, might serve as an alternative beacon for women who don’t relate to mainstream models of feminism, from the white middle-class edicts of Gloria Steinem or Catherine McKinnon to the New Agey go-girl televangelism of Oprah.