Chorus: Group Exhibition
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Chorus, unites six contemporary painters whose works join to explore representations of the body and its role in art of the 21th century.
With themes of transience, overwhelm, anonymity, and humour, Chorus highlights the complexities of body imagery and the modern human experience. With images ranging from repeated orderly forms, to sprawling bodies, or singular figures enduring the isolating nature of the digital age, Chorus works to unveil the nuances of form and feeling in contemporary life through figurative imagery.
Rooted in art history’s enduring engagement with the human form, Chorus reflects on the artists’ relationships with the body, both as a singular and collective entity. Challenging the conventions of portraiture, much of Chorus reaches beyond the individual, offering universal and anonymised imagery of the body to serve as a unified image to resonate with all. Here, humankind is unveiled to be inherently social and cumulatively minded, rendering the intrinsically harmonious nature of the body - an integral facet of humanity.
These themes are diversely explored across the six artists who create Chorus: Eleanor Johnson, Jack Penny, Julia Moon, Marina Priyomova, Yoora Lee and Ewa Czwartos.
Through an emphasis of movement and the instability of the mind, Eleanor Johnson’s sprawling figures and fluid brushstrokes set the tone for the exhibition and its desire to understand the complexities of the human experience in imagery of the body. With an emphasis on uniformity, Ewa Cwartos’ nuanced approach to imagining the body as a collective image, revisits historical portraiture, creating large-scale paintings of repeated forms through adopting the visual language of the period. Chaos and hedonism of the modern-day working man is celebrated in the art of Jack Penny, where his farcical representations of the expressive waiters are shown to find humour in the seriousness of city life. The perception the body through the lens of the digital age is explored by Yoora Lee, where her work adopts motifs of distortion to nod towards the fragility of memory and its impact on our understanding of form and figure. The anonymous body is examined in Marina Priyomova’s faceless renderings of group portraits, where her layered approach to painting nods towards the inevitable erasure of memory, as individuals become mere figures as their identities fade over time. Finally, Julia Moon’s work celebrates the transient, fleeting nature of the body in modern life, where the boundaries between figure, object, and space dissolve in her blurred images of the nude body.
Together, the artists in Chorus interrogate the complexities of figuration, understanding the body as something shaped through memory, history, visual culture and societal pressure. This exhibition gives voice to the artists’ unique perspectives on how the body is perceived in the experience of contemporary human life.
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Selected works
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Collecting
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