The Body in Women’s Art Now: Flux, Rollo Contemporary Art

Flux, the second in a trio of exhibitions devoted to images of women by women, immediately grabs your attention with an in-your-face animation by Swedish artist Natalie Djurberg. Clay figures enact grotesque stories that have a nasty, fairytale edge. A naked mother plays with her five children until, one after another, the youngsters climb into her vagina and disappear.

This return to the womb proves problematic, though, for as the siblings jostle for space, their limbs begin to pop out through the mother’s back, belly and thighs, eventually turning her into a monstrous composite lumbering clumsily around the room like an arthritic spider.

In The Necessity of Loss, a man in 18th-century dress controls his passion for a young girl by lopping off his offending penis, arms, legs and finally head. "What do we do when you’re only a face?" asks the distraught child in a speech bubble before resolving the question by removing her knickers and pleasuring herself with the man’s phallic nose. These dark comedies are achieved with such aplomb that they seem utterly plausible as demonstrations of the parent/child relationship, which makes them as subversive as they are funny.

The English painter Cecily Brown is best known for translating hard-core porn into the bravura brush-work normally associated with masculine virility. But there’s a problem; adopting demeaning images of women is not an act of reclamation, but a reiteration that doesn’t offer much redress. On show here, New Louboutin Pumps is the most interesting. A naked couple are having sex in what looks like a studio. Traditionally the scene would be of an artist and his model, but, placed centre stage, the woman is so active that the squiggles of paint energising the canvas seem to embody her sexual excitement and to lay claim to the space as an arena for her creative energy (rather than his).

Brown’s commanding canvas makes Tracey Emin’s monoprints look rather tame. Lying on her back with legs splayed, a woman masturbates. At White Cube last year, Emin showed a video of the drawings animated into a loop of never-ending onanism that produced a lonely mood of neurotic frenzy. In the stills, the rapidly drawn angularity of the lines suggests desperation and anxiety and, although the images acknowledge female desire, they also imply an urgent need for a man, which is hardly an empowering message.

In Tiina Heiska’s series Butterfly Caught (pictured right), a blonde girl in a pink frock wanders into a dark wood. The Finnish painter portrays the girl from behind in blurry images suggesting movement; we seem to be tracking her as she walks on ahead. To say that a sense of menace permeates the paintings would be an overstatement; they are more ambiguous and disconcerting than that, especially once you become aware that, essentially, they are a foil for your own fears.

With all vitality drained away, the adolescents in Sarah Lederman’s paintings are like the victims of some voracious vampire. The waifs in Ascending in Tights (pictured left) are so light that they levitate, leaving a trail of watery paint trickling from their scrawny bodies. Annunciation offers a view of the Virgin Mary not as a willing recipient of the fertilising seed so much as a victim bullied into submission. The purple blotches round her eyes suggest a beating, while her naked body, hunched shoulders and traumatised stare make her seem more like a sex slave than a saint. The suggestion is that the myth of the virgin birth is a patriarchal con inducing women to accept sexual advances while denying their own needs and desires. The strong statement is made so quietly, however, that the implications have to be teased out.

The girl in Helen Carmel Benison’s video Saturation Between my Legs is bursting with robust health, yet as she stares to camera, her unsmiling face suggests ambivalence about the message being conveyed. Lush images of flowering vegetation saturate the screen with heightened colour. Amid this cornucopia, she sits with a mirror between her legs from which fireworks explode in orgasmic cascades, as though her crotch were on fire with cosmic energy. Flowers and fireworks may be saccharine, MTV clichés, but the presence of a projected eye positioned so the mirror becomes its pupil suggests that the artist has read The Story of O as well as Berger, Baudrillard, Barthes et al and is exploring (or parodying) current thinking about female sexuality and the power of the gaze and of our projected fantasies.

The theme supposedly linking these disparate works is the instability of the female body and the uncontrollable nature of desire. It's vague enough to include almost anything and, as this assemblage of powerful pieces indicates, it could be the catalyst for a much larger and more comprehensive show. Yes, please.

• The Body in Women’s Art Now: Flux is at Rollo Contemporary Art, London until 5 November then at New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge from 7 November until 5 December