Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by London-based artist Anna Kenneally, titled Nocturnalia. In this suite of recent paintings, Kenneally explores the contemporary stakes of Impressionism. A movement that foregrounded the formal relationship between painterly gestures and the physical properties of light, Impressionism serves as fertile ground for Kenneally’s experimentations within illumination’s twinned counterpart–the shadows. Additionally, Kenneally shares Impressionism’s obsession with the captivating woman. The Impressionist courtesan found herself situated in a strange matrix of legal and illegal codes of conduct all governed by the male elite. Kenneally’s paintings fixate similarly on women whose very bodies map complex indices of sex and jealousy with beauty and resolute independence. The courtesan in the 19th century became a figure of modernity, a site wherein power, class, money, and sex commingled in bodily glory–similarly, Kenneally’s women become signifiers of today’s peculiar, perverse contemporaneity.