Monica Majoli, Olympus (Erron/Archer), 2024, watercolor woodcut transfer on paper, 59 1⁄4 × 84 1⁄2″

Amy, Pam, Judie, Kate: In her “Black Mirror” paintings, 2009–12, included in her recent exhibition “Distant Lover 2009–2024,” Monica Majoli commemorated former lovers and partners of yesteryear in small-format portraits and nude figure studies—shadowy depictions staged in a theatrical light inspired by Georges de la Tour. The story behind these works is unusual: The Californian painter invited women she had dated ten or fifteen years earlier for portrait sessions—to paint them and, in so doing, conjure up once more the intensity of their relationships.

The women appear before us, exposed, self-absorbed, their faces obscured, exuding an air of melancholy, which presumably says something above all about the artist and her losses—about a closeness, an intimacy that is no longer; loves that have come and gone and that the oil paintings bring back briefly to life. Majoli, who was born in 1963, evokes all this with a dramatic chiaroscuro one might easily have dismissed as kitsch. She pairs the portraits with highly abstract depictions of the bedroom in her Los Angeles home, which is decorated with black mirrors. Rendered as dark-toned color fields, they lend the project a less sentimental tone than that of the figure paintings.

A larger segment of the exhibition was dedicated to watercolor woodcut transfers featuring posing men. The motifs are drawn from 1970s gay men’s magazines such as Blueboy and Olympus, recalling a time when people in the US queer community were starting to become more open about their sexual orientation but when HIV was still beyond the horizon. It’s the same era German viewers recently saw reflected in “Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty” at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which focused on the artist’s queer identity. Majoli’s large-format nudes are not quite as explicit as Warhol’s, but the naked young men look like they must be indulging in erotic fantasies; some emulate the ideal beauty of ancient archetypes. Majoli’s emphatically flat woodcuts downplay spatial depth while abstracting from their photographic sources. We never see the men in action, though there is no shortage of genitalia, executed in bland pastel hues. In fact, these models in warm-toned domestic environments are stylized figures depicted with a formal aesthetic that brings, say, Henri Matisse to mind. Like the women’s portraits, these works strike a plaintive note, grieving, in this instance, for poster boys from those men’s magazines, who may have died of AIDS in the ’80s.

It is not unusual anymore for an exhibition to pay homage to queer identity, as this one did. What sets Majoli’s oeuvre apart is the autobiographical angle from which she approaches eroticism and sexuality as well as the vulnerability they reveal. In that sense, the show not only had a confessional dimension, but it also amounted to a personal work of mourning. Meanwhile, through the artist’s staging of her memories of past girlfriends, the show emphasized that the individual and personal experience come before all collective identity. The “Black Mirror” works are riskier because they are more intimate than the ones with anonymous or pseudonymous models who appear in a more decorative manner. The avowedly subjective dimension was what lent the exhibition its emotional depth.

Translated from German by Gerrit Jackson.