For Birmingham I, Granade snatched the figures from pictures of civil rights marches, stripped them down to their birthday suits and deposited them in luminous corporate environs. People who were being terrorized by police water canon in the 1960s are now shown undergoing an intense watery titillation. Fear seems to have been replaced by hedonism. The sacrilege of turning shameful racial history into an S&M party scene dares the viewer to judge, but moralizing thoughts unravel the deeper one looks.

In Birmingham II (Dogs), the nudes share space with wild canines and they are running straight at the viewer. There is less fantasy here. Even stripped of their clothes the figures look like they're escaping a bomb blast. The composition is a study in controlled chaos and seems like it might burst at any moment from its own internal pressure.

In Family Affair, everyone looks naked and happy at an after-hours party in an empty art gallery, but the painting has a sinister finish. An underage youth gets in on the action, a grinning male vaguely threatens a supine female with a gym toy, and one of the girls is being helped up as though she were just knocked down by a bicycle. It's intimidating enough to walk in on an orgy, but the fantasy here is so curdled and compromised we're no longer sure we even want to.