Lillian Supanich’s ‘Weeping Women’ at One-Off Exhibitions

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Photo Via One-Off Exhibitions - Instagram

Lillian Supanich’s ‘Weeping Women’ at One-Off Exhibitions

For someone whose Instagram handle is @stinkybastardgirl, Lillian Supanich’s work at the newish One-Off Exhibitions on Mitchell Street is surprisingly fresh and elegant. I was wowed at first sight upon entering the compact gallery—tucked within a warren of other spaces. So much to unpack within such an intimate setting. The delicacy and restraint of the work seemed to lean toward the minimal sublime at first, but that impression quickly gave way to a more personal, complex, and desublimated story. 

“Weeping Women,” on view through November 1, is anchored by six gorgeous tonal paintings that begin with only the faintest suggestion of the figure. Each feels like a slow reveal—a meditation on the subject as construction, as landscape—built or accumulated rather than born. In concert with Supanich’s three-dimensional works and subtle architectural interventions, the paintings open an ongoing conversation about the invented self. 

The subjects in the Weeping Women paintings are not given to us whole; they’re built up from paper and layers of paint. Weeping Woman XI, without the prompt of its title, might read as an architectural still life, a constructivist assemblage in pigment. Yet its two yellow, makeshift feet, shifting figure–ground dynamics and dialogue with neighboring works animate it definitively. Each canvas toggles between form and flesh, rigid structure and fumbling humanity. Weeping Woman XII extends that logic with a rickety configuration of platforms on spindly legs. Over time, the material subject matter becomes anthropomorphized—fragile, fragmented and vulnerable, as we all are. Supanich approaches each painting as a site of ambivalence and contradiction, and at One-Off she uses them to further implicate the surrounding interior space. 

Contemporary Sensibility 

Borrowing its title from the modernist trope of female breakdown, “Weeping Women” reclaims the motif with a contemporary, queer sensibility. These are not Picasso’s shattered muses—though the ladies from Avignon inevitably come to mind—but fluid, constructed beings whose instability feels like a form of reckoning and self-possession. Supanich’s women have no singular essence to reveal; they exist in a perpetual state of being made and unmade. That reading is reinforced by three ghostly sculptural forms descending from the drop ceiling, adding yet another layer of metaphorical architecture to the show.  

A partially outfitted acoustic ceiling reveals the real one above through gaps in the grid—an incomplete false ceiling. Can there be a better metaphor for the manufactured self? At moments, distinctions between surface and depth collapse, leaving a lush, seductive confusion—what Supanich calls, after Adolph Rosenblatt, a state of “delirious dumbness,” that sweet spot where sincerity outpaces order. This, after all, is what we love in humans: fractured, hybrid, soulful idiosyncrasy. 

If there’s melancholy within all the work’s impressiveness and grace, it’s an active one. Supanich luxuriates in her medium, embracing its capacity for both construction and breakdown. Her touch is restrained yet confident—control without rigidity. What first appears ethereal or minimal gradually reveals emotional complexity: grief, desire, and the sheer labor of holding oneself together. The interplay of paint and architecture builds toward a single story of the human condition. 

As a Milwaukee-based painter, fabricator and taxidermist, Supanich knows what it means to assemble life from fragments and strange operations. Weeping Women extends that practice into a visual parallel for living itself. What begins as an elegant whisper of the sublime ends somewhere more raw and human—in that thick, unstable space where identity, like oil paint, never quite dries under its skin, and the self, like architecture, degrades and obsolesces, requiring periodic renovation.