Lilli Hill’s paintings of brash women test the notion of obscenity. The ladies exposing themselves in her paintings are mostly big and almost always brash, posing nude in the evacuated context of a formal portrait. Hill paints the great, creamy rolls of her fleshy women with impressive detail, and the expressions and postures are poised to convey a hearty defiance and flirtatiousness — whether embracing a minotaur, decapitating roosters, or channeling Rubens. That defiant gaze makes the ladies’ portraits both difficult to look away from and a lighthearted study of disgust and curiosity.
