In Leipzig-based painter Rosa Loy’s phantasmagoric compositions, the industrious, rosy-cheeked women of socialist realism are recast in Kafkaesque mise-en-scènes, in which they farm human-faced heads of lettuce, feed lollipops to Harpies wearing headbands, and recline on couches in poses of analysands more than odalisques.

Propaganda and art are often thought of as opposites: The former rehashing cliches to serve the powers that be, and the latter inspiring individuals to believe they are in the presence of something special — a unique human expression, unlike anything else in the world.

The women in Rosa Loy’s dreamlike figurative paintings have always been engaged in something significant: just don’t ask the artist what it all means. In a new show at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, the member of the so-called New Leipzig School is happy for her paintings to lead to a little confusion. Words by Katya Tylevich