GEORGE ROUY: FOR THE BLEED PART I AT HAUSER & WIRTH LONDON
October 7, 2024 – December 21, 2024
GEORGE ROUY: FOR THE
BLEED PART I AT HAUSER & WIRTH LONDON
October 7, 2024 –
December 21, 2024
Emerging as a leading
figure of the new generation of painters, George Rouy’s debut solo exhibition
at Hauser & Wirth London, ‘The Bleed, Part I,’ will present a new body of
work continuing his inquiry into collective mass, multiplicity and movement.
The second chapter, ‘The Bleed, Part II,’ will follow at Hauser & Wirth
Downtown Los Angeles in February 2025. Rouy’s dynamic and signature use of the
human figure, vexed with desire, alienation and crisis, speaks to the emotional
extremities of our time, resulting in explorations of identity and embodiment
in a globalised, technologically-driven 21st Century.
‘The bleed’ is an
expression used by Rouy to pertain to the relationship between figure and
void—or ‘the surrounds’, as termed by the artist—and how those two realms
interact and manifest on the surface of his paintings, resulting in a physical
seeping, blending and merging. ‘The surrounds’ refers to the zone where flesh
and inner parts of the body meet their surrounding conditions—from intensive
properties of temperature, density and speed to extensive forms of mass, volume
and entropy. The paintings on view not only reflect the tension present between
figures and their surrounds but also the tensions and harmonies among
individuals or a group.
Amongst these themes is
the idea of ‘carrying’, exploring how we are carried into—and eventually out
of—life, alongside feelings of being carried, or the opposite, being dropped.
Applied to the mass of figures within his paintings, Rouy considers collective
care and how we care for each other from birth until death, how our lives are a
sequence of experiences of balance and unease.
In these new works,
abstraction is used as a tool of pursuing a sensation of distortion. The
gestural sections are used not as abstract marks per se but as a series of
signals to breakages in the figures, and to control the pace of looking at the
picture. The works offer an uncanny familiarity, with each composition invoking
forms and feelings born as much from the artist’s mind as they are a
phantasmagoria, lost of reference and time.
Indeed, the works
integrate many different photographic, lens and screen-based references. Rouy
has always sought for his paintings to reference the human form ‘from life’
through a ‘distorted reality’ which he is able to find at source on screen or
in photography. That said, he equally sees painting as an extraction of reality,
with an uneasy connection or relation back to it.
For ‘The Bleed, Part I,’
Rouy experiments with a purely monochrome palette for the first time, resulting
in works that he calls ‘phantom paintings.’ The combination of silver pigment
and black charcoal creates new opportunities to explore the extremes of light
and darkness, shadow and illumination, making visible previously hidden aspects
of form.
Rouy’s figures become
increasingly abstracted, their faces often blurred or completely removed. As
the face is increasingly eliminated as a signifier or signpost in his paintings
the hands take on a new role, connecting different parts of the painting
together, as well as guiding the viewer around the painting surface,
composition, and ideas. This blurring allows Rouy to create space within the
work; by avoiding any distinct markers of gender or identity, the work taps
into a common consciousness and transcends a locked experience. In illustrating
a mass or collective of figures in extreme or altered psychological stages,
Rouy references classical tragedy paintings—such as ‘The Raft of Medusa’ (1818)
by Theodore Gericault, in which the survivors of a shipwreck are depicted—in
his desire to reflect how the body itself provokes emotion. Rouy’s barely
distinguishable figures suspended weightlessly on the canvas are inspired by
the feeling of Gericault’s figures floating adrift out at sea.
Articulating a vocabulary
of figurative painting which is as distinctive as it is visceral, Rouy’s
paintings are defined by contradictions: stasis and flow, precision and
indeterminacy. In doing so, he undermines the body as a fixed unit, proposing
instead a body that constantly imagines and defines itself through its
relationship with itself, with others and with the world at large.
FORMLESS
BEING 2024
Acrylic and
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
240 x 270 x 4 cm / 94 1/2 x 106 1/4 x 1 5/8 in
Courtesy the
Artist and Hannah Barry Gallery
© George Rouy, Photo: Damian Griffiths
GIVEN EVERY
CHANCE 2024
Acrylic
Paint, Silver Pigment and Charcoal on Linen
Dimensions:
100 x 120 x 4 cm / 122.8 x 10.2 x 5 cm (framed)
39 3/8 x 47
1/4 x 1 5/8 in / 48 3/8 x 4 x 2 in (framed)
Courtesy the
Artist and Hannah Barry Gallery
© George Rouy, Photo: Damian Griffiths
ABSENCE 2024
Oil and
Acrylic on Linen
Dimensions:
240 x 190 x 4 cm / 94 1/2 x 74 3/4 x 1 5/8 in
Courtesy the
artist and Hannah Barry Gallery
© George Rouy, Photo: Damian Griffiths
PHANTOM 2024
Acrylic
Paint, Silver Pigment and Charcoal on Linen
Dimensions:
240 x 190 x 4 cm / 94 1/2 x 74 3/4 x 1 5/8 in
Courtesy the
Artist and Hannah Barry Gallery
© George Rouy, Photo: Damian Griffiths
PHANTOM 2024 (DETAIL)
FROM THE
CRADLE 2024
Acrylic and
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
250 x 220 x 4 cm / 98 3/8 x 86 5/8 x 1 5/8 in
Courtesy the
Artist and Hannah Barry Gallery
© George Rouy, Photo: Damian Griffiths
SHEER
THICKENING 2024
Acrylic
Paint, Silver Pigment and Charcoal on Linen
Dimensions: 240
x 190 x 4 cm / 94 1/2 x 74 3/4 x 1 5/8 in
Courtesy the
Artist and Hannah Barry Gallery
© George Rouy Photo: Damian Griffiths
POSEUR 2024
Acrylic and
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
250 x 220 x 4 cm / 98 3/8 x 86 5/8 x 1 5/8 in
Courtesy the
Artist and Hannah Barry Gallery
© George Rouy, Photo: Damian Griffiths
FLASH THOUGHT
2024
Acrylic and
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
100 x 120 x 4 cm / 39 3/8 x 47 1/4 x 1 5/8 in
122.8 x 102.3
x 5 cm / 48 3/8 x 40 1/4 x 2 in (framed)
Courtesy the
Artist and Hannah Barry Gallery
© George Rouy, Photo: Damian Griffiths
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ABOUT GEORGE ROUY
British artist George
Rouy’s dynamic and signature use of the human figure, vexed with desire,
alienation and crisis, speaks to the extremities of our time; portraits of
identity in a globalized and technologically driven 21st Century.
Focused on the
relationship between interior landscapes and the body in motion, Rouy’s work
presents us with a new language confronting the human body with bold and
subversive energy, transformation and flux. Shapeshifting from unified, ambient
subjects made strange and alluring through their sparse and enduring symbolism,
to fever dreams of androgynous and gestural forms, charged with lurid flashes
of pigment and passages of abstraction, Rouy’s work brings to sharp focus recurring themes: the face as a
mask, the individual as a mirror, the self as a shadow.
Rouy’s paintings dissolve
unpredictable barriers between internal and external to bring forth a singular
experience of the figure: in and out of space and place, in and out of time
past, phantom and present, and in and out of body and mind.
During his most recent
solo exhibition BODY SUIT (2023) Rouy and leading choreographer Sharon Eyal
presented their first joint creation. The outcome of their combined
perspectives was a unique, visionary live event with exacting, rigorous, and
yet liberated practices in movement, light, sound, and environment. BODYSUIT
will be expanded to a full-length live piece in 2024, premiering in London.
George Rouy (b. 1994,
Sittingbourne, Kent, UK). Lives and works in Faversham, Kent. Since graduating
from Camberwell College of Arts, he has exhibited internationally, including:
Present Tense, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, UK (2024), The Echo of Picasso,
Museo Picasso Málaga, ES, Endless Song, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York, USA
(2023), BODY SUIT, Hannah Barry Gallery, London, UK (2023), Belly Ache, Almine
Rech, Paris, FR (2022); Real Corporeal, Gladstone Gallery, New York, US (2022);
A Thing for the Mind, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, UK (2022); Shit Mirror,
Peres Projects, Berlin, DE (2022) (solo); Rested, Nicola Vassell, New York, US
(2021); and Clot, Hannah Barry Gallery, London, UK (2020).
His work is represented
in the collections of The ALBERTINA Museum & the Albertina Modern, Vienna,
AU; ICA, Miami, US; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and Lafayette
Anticipations, Paris, FR; Stahl Collection, Norrkoping, SE; M Woods, X Museum
and 69 Art Campus, Beijing, CN; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, CN.
The first monograph of
his work George Rouy Selected Works 2017-2023 with a text by Charlie Mills was
published by Tarmac Press in 2023. The live creation, BODYSUIT, with choreographer
Sharon Eyal and original music composed by Rouy, premiered at Hannah Barry
Gallery, London in 2023.
https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/george-rouy/
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