In recent critical discourse, contemporary painting has seen the emergence of what has been described as hot girl feminism: a renewed engagement with feminist figuration that foregrounds desire, embodiment, and female subjectivity. As discussed in a recent ARTnews column, this tendency has become increasingly visible across exhibitions by artists such as Chloe Wise, Ambera Wellmann, and Sasha Gordon, signalling a broader shift in how femininity is constructed and asserted in contemporary art.

Despite its informal terminology, hot girl feminism articulates a serious position. Rather than rejecting beauty, sensuality, or visibility—qualities historically used to undermine women’s artistic authority—this discourse reclaims them as sites of agency. The works associated with this moment do not present women as objects of the gaze, but as authors of it.

From Critique to Authorship

Earlier feminist art practices were largely grounded in critique, exposing structures of exclusion and challenging dominant modes of representation. While these concerns remain central, the current moment marks a transition toward self-authored presence. The figures depicted in these works are neither allegorical nor explanatory; they assert autonomy through opacity, contradiction, and emotional immediacy.

Hot girl feminism does not operate solely in opposition to the male gaze; it moves beyond it. Desire is no longer framed as complicity, but as agency. Visibility becomes a choice rather than a condition imposed.

Embodiment, Desire, and the Female Gaze

A defining feature of this discourse is its emphasis on embodiment and lived experience. Rather than offering fixed narratives or symbolic clarity, these works privilege emotional proximity and material presence. Sensuality, vulnerability, and self-awareness coexist, resisting moral or visual simplification.

In this context, “hotness” functions not as spectacle but as strategy, an assertion of visibility on one’s own terms. The female gaze is not reactive; it is generative.

Stella Kapezanou and Pretty Little Crimes

Within this context, Stella Kapezanou’s practice resonates as a particularly grounded articulation of this feminist position. Her work approaches femininity as a lived and unstable condition, shaped by vulnerability, defiance, pleasure, and restraint.

In Pretty Little Crimes, Kapezanou examines transgression not as spectacle but as accumulation. The “crimes” suggested by the title are intimate and everyday: gestures of refusal, emotional honesty, or self-assertion that resist moral clarity. Her figures are sensual without being ornamental, vulnerable without being passive. They do not seek to resolve contradiction; they inhabit it.

What distinguishes Kapezanou’s work within the broader momentum of hot girl feminism is its resistance to aestheticisation. Her feminism is not stylistic but structural, embedded in material presence and emotional tension rather than visual excess.

Why This Moment Matters

As feminist figuration continues to gain momentum, it reflects a wider desire for representations that allow space for contradiction, intimacy, and self-authorship. Rather than presenting definitive statements, this moment in contemporary art foregrounds experience, emotion, and presence.

Within this landscape, Pretty Little Crimes presents a thoughtful exploration of these questions. Stella Kapezanou’s work contributes to the conversation through a practice that is attentive to nuance and resistant to simplification, inviting viewers to reflect on femininity as something lived rather than prescribed

Selected References

• ARTnews, “The Pleasures and Perils of Hot Girl Feminism,” Art in America
• Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
• Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
• Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts