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.
