Childbirth

Clarity Haynes is no stranger to intimate body parts in their most exposed form. She’s spent more than two decades rendering in paint nude, though often studiously accessorized, hips-to-neck portraits of nonbinary, trans and female individuals in her “Torsos” series.

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These works were mostly created from live sessions sitting with models, but when the pandemic hit in 2020, the artist had to rethink her process. Haynes decided to return to the trompe l'oeil altar, a motif she had first worked with in the early '90s and later picked back up in the late '10s. Taking close-up photos of births across a giant, heart-shaped canvas, she created Blood Altar, (Study), 2020. From there, Haynes began experimenting with those standalone snapshots as scaled-up compositions.

Her resulting “Birth” painting series takes the artist’s focus on intimate physicality to an existential extreme as each recreates a photograph of a birth—specifically, a visual of the moments the baby crowning. Given Haynes’ jewel-toned pigmentation and closely cropped compositions around buttocks, upper thighs and genitals, it’s not immediately clear what the subject matter is upon first glance. But then, as the infant emerging from the birth canal comes into focus, the effect is at once disorienting, startling and unforgettable. “I'm interested in not showing the body as it's in a whole form as it's expected,” she tells Family Style. 

Nine “Birth” paintings, created between 2021 and 2023—along with a “Torso” painting and five “Altar” works including the finale, a 2023 version of Blood Altar—are on view in “Portals,” a solo show inaugurating the new Chelsea space of the gallery New Discretions, which was founded by Benjamin Tischer of Invisible Exports.

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Considering the show in the context of today’s political climate, it’s impossible to ignore the sociopolitical resonance of Haynes’ subject matter at hand. “It’s also just an expression of a really, really old attempt to culturally control the bodies of people assigned female at birth,” she reflects. “It's not really new. When I'm thinking about paintings, I'm thinking about art history and a larger scheme of time. And the current moment is part of that.”

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“Clarity Haynes: Portals” is on view through April 13, 2024 at New Discretions at 515 West 20th Street, 3rd floor, New York, NY 10011.