REPRISE — George Rouy

REPRISE, the latest body of work by London-based artist George Rouy, is the subject of a pair of sequential exhibitions—at Hannah Barry Gallery (4 June – 12 September) and at Hauser & Wirth New York (10 September – 17 October)—that spotlight the artist’s ongoing, helictical exploration of the human body in states of transformation, reconstruction and becoming.

About the artist

George Rouy is recognised as a leading figure in a new generation of international artists. His dynamic and signature use of the human figure, vexed with desire, freedom, alienation and crisis, speaks to the extremities of our time. Bodies - captured alone, gathered in quiet groups, or imprisoned in crowds of amorphous energy - move from absorption and poise to expansive forces of incitement and charge.

Together they present rhapsodic explorations of mass, movement and identity in a globalised and technologically driven 21st century, alluding to recurring themes of figure and phantom, landscape and anatomy, faces and masks. This bold and subversive corporeal language captures the grave beauty and perpetual transformation of our contemporary moment. Articulating a vocabulary of painting as distinctive as it is visceral, Rouy’s works are defined by contradictions: stasis and flow, precision and indeterminacy, chaos and harmony.

All his work is an ongoing inquiry into the body and the body as a landscape, an ongoing deconstruction of the image towards an expression of the human body in the throes of becoming, reconstruction and reformation. His painterly language embraces at once extreme figuration and pure abstraction to capture the perpetual transformations of the body in our contemporary moment. His work undermines the perception of the body as a fixed unit, proposing instead a body that he has described as “at war with itself”, that constantly imagines and defines itself through its relationship with itself, with others and with the world at large.