Janet Werner, an artist with a nearly four-decade career, has created a new body of work titled "Landscape with Legs" that distorts fashion imagery from Vogue archives and vintage campaigns by Marc Jacobs. Her paintings transform archetypal fashion models—thin, blonde, and emblematic of privilege—into unsettling, complex figures that expose a tension between glamor and the grotesque. The exhibition runs from May 1 to June 12, 2026, at Anat Ebgi Gallery in New York, marking her second solo show there. In an interview, Werner discusses her background as a dancer, her creative process of collaging photographic images with art historical references like Watteau and Caspar David Friedrich, and the political moment that makes the show feel urgent.
This article matters because Werner's work arrives at a cultural moment when hyper-thin beauty standards are resurfacing and early-2000s fashion culture is reentering the spotlight. Her paintings interrogate women as objects of desire and probe power dynamics within feminine identity, straddling the worlds of art and fashion. By twisting familiar beauty ideals into something exposing and psychologically complex, Werner offers a critical counterpoint to mainstream fashion imagery, making her practice newly relevant in contemporary discourse about representation, agency, and objectification.