Liz Markus’ recent paintings are oil portraits of people—usually iconic figures from the past—who haunt the collective unconscious. These are not traditional tributes or realist likenesses; they are apparitions, archetypes, psychological projections. Some are famous. Some are familiar only to her. All of them stand in for something larger: gender, glamour, power, vulnerability, collapse.

After years of working with acrylic on unprimed canvas—fast, raw, and immediate—Markus has turned to oil painting to go deeper, slower, and stranger. The medium slows her down in a way that makes her sit longer with the people she paints. They don’t feel like subjects. They feel like visitations.

Certain figures return again and again—Jackie, C.Z Guest, Babe Paley—not out of nostalgia, but compulsion. Markus revisits them the way you revisit a recurring dream, or a riddle you can’t quite solve. Repetition becomes its own kind of séance.

“The painting decides when it's complete—I just listen.” That might mean a background left undone, a face that dissolves at the edges, or a sketchlike looseness that resists completion. “I trust that moment now. It tells me when to walk away.”

Markus is interested in collapsing time: the 1970s bleeding into the 1870s, the 20th century surfacing in a dream of the 21st. These works are part séance, part satire. She thinks of them as both love letters and interrogations. My goal is to create a space where image and identity are not fixed, but slippery—eroding, becoming, returning.