Fruit Picnic. Photograph: Gavin Brown
Gone pear-shaped
In this riot of fabric and fruit by the New York-based painter, figures dissolve into pattern. The curvy pears, apples and watermelon of the picnic blanket echo thighs, boobs and bums. There’s a confusion of three dimensions and two, reminding us that this is all a flat painted fantasy.
Girls’ world
But whose fantasy? The use of gorgeous pattern directly recalls Matisse, but while the painting’s poseurs are lushly inviting, they offer far from straightforward visual pleasure. This girls’ world has been filtered through a 21st-century feminism that acknowledges the complexity of women’s identity now.
Shoe-gazer
Men are largely absent in Kruglyanskaya’s work, but their presence is felt. Here the melon rinds and leaves are comically phallic and suggestively positioned; the lone shoe is a classic Freudian symbol for both male and female.
Made You Look
Our gaze is confronted with a knowing wink on the left; on the right, a red-lipped belt buckle does a show-off femme fatale leer in order to double as a vagina dentata. These gals have agency, and looking at them is a risky business.
Tate Liverpool, to 18 Sep
