She's Hit
1967

In She’s Hit, Jim Nutt subjects the body of a female figure to disfigurations and grotesque violence. Wearing a nametag that reads “Miss Cast,” she is covered in sharp metal objects, hardware, bandages, tattoos, and bulbous sores. Behind her, cartoon knives stick out of a blood-spurting wall, suggesting that the woman is the receiving end of a knife-throwing act. The work is an early example of Nutt’s ongoing, typically outrageous portraits of women, and it exemplifies his meticulous technique, in which he applies thinned acrylic paint on plexiglass to create a hard-edged and airy visual effect. In She’s Hit and similar works, Nutt filters the history of portraiture through the deranged sensibility of cartoons, comic books, and 1960s drug culture. Yet while the work is crude, the woman’s animalistic ferocity and resistance to traditional notions of beauty make her a formidable—even fearsome—vision of femininity.