Falon Stutzman: Woman having a hard time

Megan Mulrooney Gallery is pleased to present Woman Having a Hard Time, the debut solo exhibition of Omaha-based painter Falon Stutzman. Across ten new paintings, Stutzman develops a language of flattened perspective, bruised color, and big-eyed emotional states, congealing around a cartoonish archetype of personhood that’s both absurd and uncomfortably familiar. Whether curled up with a dog, waiting tables, or playing pool, her protagonists seem bottlenecked by an internal pressure that manifests in gestures at once generic and particular, stoic and grotesque.

Working in oil and flashe, Stutzman stages her figures in environments that reveal emotional truth but are spatially warped. Cropped tight like film stills, her compositions borrow the pastel mood of New Wave cinema and the plastic distortions of animation. Here, the titular "woman" becomes a site of projection, comedy, and pathos, always doing something and feeling too much.

Stutzman’s figures appear to have wandered out of some shared, subterranean girlhood: recognizable in posture and gesture, yet unplaceable in appearance. Their bodies ripple and fold like soft clay under pressure; their faces stretch into forlorn masks, at once theatrical and childlike. In this way, she renders emotion as an event of the body, not just the mind. A furrowed eyebrow, a rosy cheek, the slack curve of a mouth -- each detail composes a portrait of overwhelm that eludes (or accommodates) both irony and sentimentality. 

Color, too, performs psychological work. Stutzman’s palette comprises queasy peaches, bleached yellows, and bruised blues. Her brushwork vacillates between smoothness and friction: a backlit shoulder rendered with tenderness, a clenched hand thick with paint.

The painting titles (“Woman playing instrument,” “Woman waiting tables,” “Woman having a hard time”) echo the visual grammar of instruction manuals or old children’s books -- flattening experience into captionable acts. But the paintings themselves are not so clear and programmatic. They operate in emotional chiaroscuro, capturing moments when identity feels baroque, exaggerated, or estranged from its setting. 

Falon Stutzman (b. 1984, Silver Spring, MD; lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska) earned a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design. She has previously had solo exhibitions with Kishka Gallery, Vermont and The Door, Brooklyn, and was included in a group exhibition at Megan Mulrooney. Her work was featured in the 2024 edition of New American Paintings.