Central Server Works is pleased to present "Flesh World", a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Sofia Heftersmith and Monica Berger. Drawn together by a shared interest in pre-digital erotica, particularly vintage pornography from the 1970s and '80s, the artists reimagine the female form both as an artifact and a construct. With a critical eye on the aesthetics of desire, representation, and the commodification of the body, Flesh World interrogates the tensions inherent in the way we view and consume these images. This exhibition marks Central Server Works' second presentation with Monica Berger, following her solo show "Cafe Bizarre" in 2023, and the first exhibition with Sofia Heftersmith, who has been part of the gallery's group exhibitions "Dandelion Wine", (2023) and "Men in the Off Hours",(2025). The exhibition is born from the artists' ongoing dialogue as painters, a creative partnership that began in 2022 and has fostered a mutual exchange of ideas and references. Both artists' practices are grounded in an extensive archive of found imagery, primarily culled from the lurid pages of vintage adult magazines, with their garish colors, tactile pulp-paper textures, and an often surreal collision of text and image. These magazines serve as both inspiration and critique, with Berger using latex house paint and acrylics to manipulate and distort the figure, abstracting the original source material into vivid compositions. Heftersmith, incorporating collage techniques, explores the slippages between perception, context, and meaning, creating works that question how we read the female form within these charged visual codes. In "Flesh World", the artists’ respective practices converge in a series of paintings made specifically for the show and a collaborative collection of their works on paper that reframe the idealized female body. Through both large-scale canvases and a smaller, magazine-inspired collaboration, Berger and Heftersmith foreground the overlooked, grotesque aspects of the body—exaggerated proportions, folds of skin, traces of movement—exposing the fragility and imperfection behind the glossy ideal. Their collaboration takes the form of a bootleg magazine, complete with covers and sealed in plastic, displayed on a magazine rack. In March, CSW Press will publish the magazine at the closing of the exhibition, ahead of its wide release at the 2025 Printed Matter Art Book Fair. While both artists maintain mastery over their distinctive painterly techniques, their works exude a raw, unfiltered sensibility that transcends the confines of traditional representation. Echoing the spirit of punk in their engagement with the violence and eroticism of the body, the figures in these works exist in an unresolved space, suspended between control and abandon. This tension—similar to the early photography and poetry of Patti Smith—presents an art that cannot be neatly categorized, blending beauty with grotesquerie and desire with violence. Further, the exhibition alludes to a more mythic dimension, evoking surreal imagery reminiscent of artists like Leonora Carrington. Here, women become hybrid forms, both human and otherworldly, caught in states of flux and transformation. Their figures resist definition, hovering between the realms of the real and the imagined, the self and the object. "Flesh World" explores the contradictions embedded in these representations of the female body—not as a reclamation, but as an ongoing negotiation between desire, consumption, and objectification. It is an exhibition that does not indulge or condemn, but rather positions the viewer in the midst of the friction between the image and its viewer, where the complexities of desire are laid bare. Image: Sofia Heftersmith, "Post No Bills", 2025. Acrylic on canvas. 40 x 30 in.