Who Holds the Gaze? Lesley Bodzy’s ‘Hand of Venus’

A new solo exhibition by multimedia artist Lesley Bodzy, Hand of Venus, organized by dmincubator gallery: a recent initiative by gallerist Daniela Mercuri dedicated to incubating female artists, guides the audience away from the heavy burden of art history’s patriarchal gaze toward a more intimate and feminist terrain of desire, agency, and self-representation. The exhibition presents a new series of works that draw from and reinterpret female nudes by canonical male painters such as Giorgione, Titian, Édouard Manet, and Amedeo Modigliani.

Bodzy isolates a recurring gesture: the hand placed over the pelvic or genital area, zooming in on this subtle yet loaded moment. Through this act of reframing, she redirects attention away from the figure and toward a fragment that holds tension, control, and implication. Executed on polycarbonate sheets, the works combine print, acrylic paint, and layered mark-making, creating surfaces that are both translucent and materially layered. These are accompanied by wall-based sculptural paintings in gold and iridescent finishes, as well as several abstract expressionist-style smaller works on canvas. Together, the works operate in the space between painting and object, image, and surface, past and present producing a glimmering, almost elusive presence of the female gaze: inviting, subtle, powerfully charged.

In these works, the depicted women shift from passive subjects to active participants. The gesture of the hand, once read within art history as modesty or concealment, is reimagined as a site of autonomy. Bodzy reclaims female sexuality across centuries, bringing these figures into the present as contemporary interlocutors. One work referencing Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (c. 1510) is particularly compelling. A stain, alluding to bodily fluids, positioned behind the thumb disrupts the composition, isolating and doubling as a suggestive form that presents as a flaccid phallus. The surrounding muted palette softens and simultaneously draws the viewer closer to inspect. As I approached the work, my own reflection appears on its surface, implicating me within the image. I become part of this centuries-long dialogue: a quiet reminder that the gaze is never neutral.

This moment of reflection is key. It situates the viewer within the work’s parameters, asking us to reconsider our own role in the act of looking. Despite centuries of artistic production, Bodzy gently suggests, perhaps not much has changed. Patriarchy is alive and well, lingering, kicking, embedded within our sightlines.

There is something undeniably passionate and sensual in Bodzy’s approach: an embrace of feminine, articulated through a subtle and sophisticated handling of color and form, distilled into surfaces that shimmer and refract, offering both visual pleasure and conceptual depth.

Another work, drawing from Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), further reconstructs the time-travelling dialogue. Here, the image is flipped, transforming the hand into a form that simultaneously evokes both phallic and vaginal associations. The surface: scratched, painted, and built up, creates a near-pixelated effect, reminiscent of digital fragmentation. The almost lenticular quality of the material invites a bodily response: a wish to move to catch various reflections, to touch, to engage.

Bodzy’s work is quietly powerful. It is feminist and assertive without being overtly confrontational. It operates through nuance, offering a space for contemplation rather than declaration. “The paintings give material form to psychological states like vulnerability, tension, memory, and desire,” Bodzy notes. “They slow the viewer down and create space to engage with emotions that are often difficult to name.”

And indeed, the exhibition invites a slowing down, a recalibration of how we consume images. In a moment defined by the overwhelming acceleration of digital culture, AI-generated imagery, and the relentless objectification and consumption of bodies, Hand of Venus asks us to pause, to reconsider.

This sensitivity extends to Bodzy’s abstract works in the exhibition as well. Pieces like Quiet Divide echo the concerns of the main series, suggesting a temporal gap that spans centuries. These works recall the legacy of female abstract expressionists, whose contributions have often been overlooked, inserting their voices into the conversation.

As I complete the circle and turn back through the space, I am met and embraced by sculptural bodily paintings: golden, folded, and draped surfaces that resemble shrouds, or the layered folds of history itself. As I leave the gallery and step into the crisp April air of the Upper East Side, I find myself in a contemplative state, needing to sit down with a glass of wine. The exhibition loiters as an open-ended question, as I am reminded of something simple, yet suddenly, urgently profound: I, too, a woman, am here.

Lesley Bodzy: Hand of Venus on view through May 23, 2026, at dmincubator gallery, 16 East 71st Street, New York, NY 10021.

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