In recognition of Women’s History Month, The Jane Gallery presents The Shape of Us, a two-artist exhibition of contemporary figurative painting in which women paint the feminine form through a reflective and self-authored lens.

Opening March 6 during Old City’s First Friday, The Shape of Us explores the nude form as a constituent presence and extols the tangible over the spectacle. Our featured painters, Tulia Day and Melissa Halbrook, render the female figure with nuanced, grounded appreciation. Their works present bodies as transformative vessels that openly bear storied histories of endurance, pleasure, vulnerability, and confidence. Every piece promotes agency over idealization and invites viewers to examine the figure as psychologically complex and materially real.

The Shape of Us celebrates women in their full dimensionality: soft and strong, bold and tender, powerful and playful. Stretch marks, shifting forms, aging skin, and gestures of rest or assertion appear as markers of lived experience rather than blemishes to be corrected. The body is reclaimed as presence rather than perfection. There is no singular ideal proposed here; instead, the exhibition affirms multiplicity and self-definition.

At a moment when national conversations surrounding autonomy, accountability, and power remain active, The Shape of Us participates in a broader institutional reconsideration of the nude. Recent museum and gallery presentations dedicated to Joan Semmel’s autonomous self-portraiture and major surveys of Jenny Saville’s corporeal figuration signal renewed attention to authorship and perspective within figurative practice. Within this evolving context, Day and Halbrook’s work centers the female gaze as both subject and author.

In recognition that representation and lived reality remain intertwined, a portion of exhibition proceeds will benefit Women Against Abuse, Philadelphia’s comprehensive domestic violence advocate and service provider. Their mission is to provide quality, compassionate, and nonjudgmental services that foster self-respect and independence for individuals experiencing intimate partner violence and to lead the struggle to end domestic violence through advocacy and community education.