At the Ruttkowski Gallery, 68, the Australian painter based in New York presents her fourth solo exhibition, where flesh, gaze, and evasion compose an intimate drama. A sensual meditation on the very act of looking.
Ellen Antico, Iridescent, 2026
There is something of a stolen moment in Ellen Antico's new series. As if a camera flash had captured, in the midst of a bacchanal, an assembly of cherubic bodies that instantly freeze, shrink away, or respond to the gaze with disarming audacity. Entitled Sirens, the artist's fourth solo exhibition at the Ruttkowski gallery; 68, presented at 8 rue Charlot in the Marais district of Paris, brings together around twenty canvases painted in oil and charcoal, where the paint overflows, trembles, and refuses to give up its secrets.
Born in Sydney in 1989 and trained at the University of the Arts London, from which she graduated in 2019, Ellen Antico lives and works in New York. Her work draws on Renaissance painting and the sensual opulence of Rubens, which she reinterprets through a decidedly contemporary lens. She celebrates the female body in all its fullness: generous flesh, entwined limbs, confident skin. Under her brush, these figures meet in an intimacy that is as much about embrace as it is about struggle, play as it is about ritual.
The title, Sirens (‘sirens’) acts as a threshold. Antico summons these mythological creatures less for their fatal song than for their ambivalence: half-visible, half-submerged, suspended between appearance and disappearance. The faces in the series seem to surface in murky water, as if glimpsed in the mirror of a puddle or at the bottom of a shimmering well. Eyes, mouths, hands emerge with an almost caricatural sharpness, salient sensory points in a pictorial nebula. Everything else wavers.
Ellen Antico, Rosalie, 2026
This tension between what is revealed and what is concealed runs through the entire work. The lines are frenetic, almost drawn before being painted. Charcoal shows through the oil, hinting at sketches, revisions, unfinished anatomical studies. Certain areas of the canvas remain raw, as if deliberately left untouched. Antico embraces this incompleteness as a deliberate choice: to let the painting breathe, to allow the viewer to mentally complete what the brush has intentionally suspended.
What these canvases offer the eye, they immediately take back. The American critic Connor Goodwin, author of the exhibition text, speaks of a "conspiracy of bodies." The phrase is apt: Antico's figures seem to be plotting among themselves, complicit in a secret that excludes the viewer. Some, captured in a fleeting moment, freeze in a childlike wonder; others meet the gaze with an unsettling self-assurance.
Beneath the apparent lightness of these scenes, which might seem merely a chronicle of a dissolute night, lies a more serious question. Antico interrogates the long history of the male gaze upon the female body in painting, without ever resorting to direct condemnation. His approach is more subtle: he shifts the focus. By giving his figures control over their own appearance, by allowing them to choose what they reveal and what they conceal, the artist reshuffles the cards of complicity between viewer and viewed.
Ellen Antico, Spring's innocence, 2026
In Antico's work, line is never subjugated to color; it persists, emerges, and refuses to disappear beneath the glazes. This coexistence of drawing and painting, inherited from the great workshops of the Cinquecento, lends each canvas a quality of purity and perpetual construction. The palette shares this same sense of flux: ashen roses, faded blues, pale ochres, and rare, vivid accents—a red of the mouth, a black of the pupil—which act as points of focus within this colorful haze.
Supported by a gallery that champions a young and international scene from Cologne, Düsseldorf, New York and Paris, this fourth solo exhibition confirms the uniqueness of an artist who has passed through NADA New York, EXPO Chicago, UNTITLED Miami and Art Brussels, whose work now circulates in private collections in Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Leaving the exhibition, one carries with them the memory of a glance, or rather, an exchange of glances. Antico's sirens don't sing to attract; they sing so that we listen to them differently. And their call, strangely, lingers.
Practical information
Ellen Antico, Sirens
From 24 May to 21 June 2026
Ruttkowski Gallery; 68
8 rue Charlot, 75003 Paris
Ellen Antico, This is forever 1, 2026
Ellen Antico, Under the wing, 2026
