The Bathers at Palisades Park (King Spa)

About the Exhibition

In The Bathers at Palisade Park (King Spa), Sophy Naess transplants art history’s bather motif into a sprawling, baroque Korean spa in New Jersey. Building on her decade-long silk scarf series, the 9-by-15-foot silk painting brims with visual excess: hyper-saturated red carpets, a trio of gold elephants, and an array of boldly colored nude women.

Instead of idealized bodies arranged for the male gaze, Naess presents dazed figures of all shapes and sizes adrift in various states of repose. Naess folds a panoply of art historical references into a scene of bathers, soakers, and a depiction of herself and a friend mid-scrub. With echoes of Matisse, the title nods to Seurat, and she lifts bathing figures from Cézanne, Picasso, Kiyonaga, and ancient Chinese painting. The attendants performing the scrub treatment—the only clothed figures, with tips tucked into their bosoms—expose the labor underpinning this artificial space of leisure.

Through sharp humor, bold color, and deft appropriation, Naess re-imagines the bather as a feminist counterpoint to a romantic, patriarchal form.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

Tell us the story behind this painting.

Sophy Naess

I went to King Spa with my friend Jeannine Han, whose parents are Korean. She's first generation and grew up going to these baths and was excited for us to get this really hardcore scrubbing. It was a very memorable, bodily experience for me. You're just lying on this table naked, really being roughed up by this worker who's doing the scrubbing and flipping you over and dousing the whole table to get all of this skin off, over and over again. And I hadn't experienced my body in that way before. I just felt like this lump of dead skin, which was very humorous to me or absurd somehow.

I'm a big fan of the banya. I usually go to a Ukrainian banya in Sheepshead Bay, but it is co-ed so people are not nude there. I was first really struck by the decor of this spa. It's remarkable and cool to just see tons of women wandering around naked, totally unselfconscious, but the space itself looks very over the top. It’s like this wet room, but it has red carpet everywhere. And it has these big gold sculptures everywhere. It has three big elephants and these freizes of women and horses. Very kind of baroque.

I've always liked big group scenes, and paintings that can combine many different events into one composition. My interest in the mural scale is as a way of expanding time and space within one scene. I wanted to try and replicate that scene, but, of course, I couldn't take photos in there—and I wanted some kind of reference. So, it seemed very logical to just lean into the fact that there is a long history of the subject of the bather in painting. And so I decided to just lift all of these different bather figures from painting history. That’s where most of the figures come from.

The scene of myself and my friend getting scrubbed is in the foreground. It's the only part of the painting with anyone who's wearing clothing, because those are the people who are working there. So it's a scene of leisure, but with a little bit of an acknowledgement of the way that that environment is very constructed and contingent on people working to make it possible.

What was your research and planning process to draw from this history of painting the bather?

First I was just trying to draw it from memory, what had impressed me about this place. The first thing I did as research was to have someone photograph me in this position on the table. And so I restaged that, not nude, but I lay down and reenacted that scrubbing scene on my dining room table and my brother pretended to be the scrubber and his partner photographed it.

I realized I wasn't so aware of the particulars of the architecture of the space. I found a picture of the space online—devoid of any figures—and used that as a template. I wanted to have a really expansive view, so the horizon line is not at any kind of rational eye level. The conventions of perspective are being drawn on for certain effects, but they don't actually hold up if you break everything down orthogonally. I found some bathing scenes that also have this kind of omniscient view; Cranach's Fountain of Youth is from a funny, almost aerial perspective. Part of my research involved looking at different examples of works that have an expansive view, which I then tried to translate into an interior space.

I wanted it to be realism to the extent that it honored something about the scene at that place on that day. It's a diverse place, I felt like probably a minority white woman there, but all of these bather references that I had came mostly from Western painting history. So there's a lot of Bonnard, Cezanne, Picasso, some Kiyonaga, and then there were some figures from some ancient Chinese paintings that I had seen at the Met Museum.

But I was struggling with how to replicate the demographics of that spa while drawing from art historical sources. I drew the overall scene and then just experimented with drawing in these figures from different paintings I was looking at in books. What I really wish I had gotten in here was Colescott's bathers, because he did also a kind of spoof on art historical bathers, which would have been a nice reference.

Bob Thompson is a big presence, I think, in relation to color, which for him must have come from Gauguin. If you look at Bob Thompson paintings, they feel really in conversation with Gauguin or Matisse. There's something about the already existing layering of history in bather paintings that precede this one.

I can't help but think about Matisse as a touchstone in some way?

I wasn't thinking about The Red Studio, this place just happens to have this crazy red floor. But of course that's come up. Matisse is often invoked in relation to my work. I remember seeing the Matisse In Search of True Painting show at the Met in 2012 where multiple iterations of the same image painted in very different ways were shown alongside each other, which was fascinating. I like Matisse's idea that the whole composition is expressive, that the expressivity has to do with the whole gestalt.

I always think of a Keith Haring observation about Matisse. In Keith Haring's journals he writes about how Matisse's process of first painting a sheet of paper a certain color but then cutting the shape out of this colored paper was a way of kind of condensing drawing and painting into one gesture. Cutting, you're making the contour, but you're also making the color field. The silhouette, of course, is completely intertwined with the use of stencils.

This silk painting evolved out of your silk scarf series. You began that series at the Robert Blackburn Studio and then started producing the scarves with stencils.

There’s a kind of fancy term for stenciling in the print world, which is this French word "pochoir," which is like daubing color through a stencil. I saw that relative to Sonia Delaunay's work. She made these really beautiful pochoir prints.

It depends on what kind of an image it is. If it involves fairly large, bold color fields, then it's possible to do it with a stencil and it might make more sense to do it that way. Silkscreen is basically a stencil process, it creates an open versus closed sequence of areas on the screen that it gets pushed through. So yes, I cut stencils out of mylar, and I use them often in the scarves, and that's how these bigger ones were made as well. With a lot of mylar.

Tell us more about the silk scarves and how they emerged as a practice?

I've been making silk scarves as a subscription series since 2015. Not too long after I finished grad school, I heard about a project that the artist David Horvitz was doing called Studio Rent, where I think he would offer an edition of photographic prints on a monthly basis to raise funds to cover his studio rent. I thought that was a great idea.

I started doing that with prints on paper that I was making at the Robert Blackburn print shop. When I consulted with some of the people that had been subscribing to those prints on paper subscription series, it came up that it can become burdensome to collect a lot of a certain kind of thing. I explored what would be something that you could receive on a monthly basis for a while and not become difficult to store.

I had made paintings on silk in grad school. I arrived at the idea that silk scarves would be easy to send. I have always been an avid thrift shopper and I used to collect interesting silk scarves. I liked the idea of having my own scarf label that would maybe eventually turn up in these places. So I started making scarves.

They, for me, are a very literary part of my practice, which I really enjoy. Each one has some kind of a story that comes along with it, whether it has to do with events in the world at large or just something in my private life or something related to other research that I'm doing in my studio.

After five years of making those scarves, I had the idea to scale them up from the 22-inch square I had always used. I could move towards a more expansive, painterly approach by making them bigger. This turned out to be so much more labor than I had anticipated, partly because it's just harder to print on something that size, and I kind of struggled to keep up with the schedule of the larger scarves. Then I had the idea that because they come from a stencil matrix of some kind, if I were to make a really big one that might take me like the whole year, I could use the same set of stencils to produce these smaller kind of outtakes from the big thing, and that's what the subscribers would receive.

I had a professor who once said the market is another material that we work with differently as artists. The scarf thing is really about playing with different relationships to how the work is sold and consumed. So I liked the idea of suddenly shifting to this really big thing. There’s an edition of only two of them. They’re still like the silk scarves, but now they're 9-by-15 feet, which reflects the dimensions of the biggest wall in my apartment. One is for my own home, and the other one is available.

The subject matter of the scarves has ranged all over the place. The very first one was about these weird little glass pipes that I had seen for sale with tiny flowers inside, and I didn't know what it was, and then I learned that it's actually a crack pipe, but it's disguised as a little gift container for a paper flower. That was the first one, the next one was a forest scene, the Mandarin duck that appeared in Central Park was one of them, lots about stuff that happened during the last Trump administration.

This piece has a very theatrical mise-en-scene that tells several stories in one space. Going back to your graduate thesis at Rutgers, there was a similar tableau-like proscenium that referenced old Japanese postcard prints in a modern setting. Can you speak about exploring this tradition over time?

That postcard was of a print that I think was called The Marketplace and showed different kinds of laborers’ activities. With that painting in grad school, it was about a kind of longing for all of these interactions that happen outside the institution—what do I miss while I'm here in this hermetic studio program? It was an homage to all of these other kinds of creative exchanges among people who weren't operating within that MFA institutional context, and a celebration of a lot of what would be more minor efforts in the field.

I remember feeling like the work that I was making, which had mostly to do with portraiture and interior spaces, different kinds of more or less intimate relationships, was regarded as kind of unambitious and diminutive and feminized. The large scale really was just like a very basic way of trying to invert that. Like I'm going to make these paintings about friends painting each other's nails and sewing each other's clothing, but on this heroic scale.

There’s some of that in this piece too. I mean, there's something a bit funny about this kind of mural scale painting—that you would expect from its scale to be imparting something important—to just show all these dazed nudes wandering around this spa. But it was really about feeling quite impressed with that space and wanting to attempt to replicate the wonder of this giant, weirdly decorated, very ostentatious space of bathing. Also, in terms of the history of the nude as an idealized form, there's a kind of ironic contrast with the actual conditions of the banya, which is just a lot of spaced out people who have been cooking in hot water for a long time.