Srijon Chowdhury at Anat Ebgi

On view: November 2–December 14, 2019

In a Culver City gallery, a pale, ghostly woman lays astride a horse, scythe in hand, as if headed into battle. Anat Ebgi’s press release points us to a somewhat overdramatic William Blake poem—“Cruelty has a Human Heart / And Jealousy a Human Face,” it reads. Artist Srijon Chowdhury lifts this text to create a gate-like pattern over the female rider, abstracting letters until few are legible. In another painting nearby, a similar female figure, pregnant, holds a child and emerges from a red field of ghostly apparitions, as if triumphing over some kind of evil. Contrasting all this romantic drama alluding to war, triumph, and jealousy, a small, dark painting called 3am depicts a baby in a crib as it’s bottle-fed. But it’s in a painting partitioned to the gallery office, depicting the artist’s partner giving a water birth, that Chowdhury (a recent father of two) pinpoints the exhibition—amidst its darker themes—toward fatherhood and the majestic process of childbirth.