BEA SCACCIA: GROOMED

Heels Over Head-Or Pillow Talk, 2026

Gagosian is pleased to announce Groomed, an exhibition of seven new paintings by Bea Scaccia in New York.

September 22 — December 23, 2026

The paintings in Groomed depict elaborate, sumptuous scenes filled with accumulations of fabric and various accoutrements of feminine style including wigs, costume jewelry, shoes, belts, zippers, plastic chains, hair clips, bows, tassels, and faux fur. Backed by colorful curtains and patterned wallpaper, and occupied by chairs, beds, and ladders, these nighttime scenarios are illuminated by representations of fringed lamps, clip-on book lights, and precariously placed lit candles.

Incorporating an array of deliberately clashing textures and garish colors, these collections of objects come together to approximate faceless bodies and puppetlike limbs that are sheathed in fishnet tights, positioned as if in arrested motion. These partially formed figures appear to attempt activities—sitting, reclining, reading, climbing, and exercising—that they cannot quite complete.

Training for the Broken, 2026

The exhibition’s largest painting, Heels over Head—or Pillow Talk (2026), is a diptych that parodies the reclining female figure of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), as well as the Rococo subject of a woman reading in a boudoir, as seen in such paintings as Jean Honoré Fragonard’s Young Girl Reading (1769). Rather than the expected contrast between painted flesh and fabric, it represents tangles of cloth and pillows held tenuously together on a bed, faceless but holding up a book.

In other paintings, surrogates for figures occupy chairs, but without managing to fully sit on them. Holding dumbbells and contorted in yoga-like poses, they suggest a mania for fitness and physical self-improvement. Additional works feature ladders over which cloth and other materials are draped and dispersed, climbing nowhere, and hanging like marionettes.