George Rouy Joins Hauser & Wirth in Collaboration With Hannah Barry Gallery

‘George Rouy’s unique paintings and performance works, speak of a challenging modernity, of an overwhelming anxiety and the guilty pleasures of life,’ says Neil Wenman, Global Creative Director and Partner, Hauser & Wirth. ‘They are disturbing and yet familiar, approachable yet repulsive, as if held captive in a liminal space between psyche and being, memory and edifice. His paintings create a world whereby we are caught in a loop; we see, we arouse, we deny, we suffocate, we undo.

We are delighted to collaborate with Hannah Barry, a dear friend. I was thrilled with the idea of working side-by-side with her to support George’s artistic development and to bring his work to ever wider international audiences.’

‘George and I have worked together since 2017. His work offered me a propulsive new way of thinking about the physical and psychological experience of the figure and the body,’ says Hannah Barry. ‘His committed line of inquiry is without compromise, and I admire that. It is exciting for him and for us to join forces with Hauser & Wirth, a gallery I have admired since first visiting exhibitions in London—Paul McCarthy in 2003 and Isa Genzken in 2008 at the Lutyens designed former bank on Piccadilly, the Coppermill shows and more recently the program at Durslade in Somerset and Mark Bradford’s ‘Masses and Movements’ in Menorca. We are looking forward to George’s exhibition in London and to working together!’

The artist’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, ‘The Bleed,’ featuring new works, opens in London in October 2024. This is followed by a new full-length version of BODYSUIT, Rouy’s collaborative creation with renowned choreographer Sharon Eyal. Their joint creation, featuring music composed by Rouy, premieres in November 2024 in London before embarking on an international tour to Paris, Vienna and Milan.

Rouy’s work is represented in the collections of The ALBERTINA Museum & the Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria; ICA Miami, FL; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, France; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, France; Ståhl Collection, Norrköping, Sweden; M Woods Museum, Beijing, China; X Museum, Beijing, China; 69 Art Campus, Beijing, China; and Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China.

About the artist
George Rouy (born 1994) lives and works in Faversham, Kent. Graduating from Camberwell College of Arts in London in 2015, early group exhibitions, including at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris in 2019, featured works displaying subtle references to medieval painting and to 15th-century masters, such as Jean Fouquet, and the northern European tradition. Rouy’s fascination with French and Dutch painting is also apparent in figurative works from this time, in which the artist confronts his subjects head on, featuring rigid Gothic postures and intensely chromatic colors.

As Rouy’s practice evolved, following solo exhibitions internationally in London, New York, Paris, Berlin and Hong Kong, he has increasingly experimented with an expressive application of paint. Describing this development in technique, curator Charlie Mills says, ‘As his work has continued, increasingly the use of large gestural brushwork—industrious strokes that call to mind the bold and affective drives of his modernist forbears—is coupled with the granular minerals of raw pigment; an uncanny proximity that evokes the ecstasy of fluid and abstract embodiment alongside the primal and carnal howls of our interior world.’ Within his elusive group scenes, such as ‘Endless Song’ (2023), certain elements of the body are distorted, highlighted or emphasized, signaling altered psychological states. Forging a vocabulary of figurative painting, which is as distinctive as it is visceral, his paintings are defined by contradictions—statis and flow, precision and indeterminacy—all in order to undermine the body as a fixed unit, exposing the hybridity of technology, sexuality and gender. The graded layers of the painted surface reflect an age of Photoshop and digital identities, whilst grounded in timeless and amorphous qualities that contribute to their intensity. Rouy describes his works as, ‘not portraits, not memories, the paintings are symbols of moments.’

For Rouy’s solo exhibition in 2023 at Hannah Barry Gallery in London, he worked with choreographer Sharon Eyal to present the first iteration of their collaborative creation, BODYSUIT. This complemented the move from soft-focus figuration to energetic and increasingly abstract form, signifying a transformative period for the artist. As a result, Rouy’s figures seem to defy the containment of their own boundaries as dislocated facial features merge into expressive painterly gestures. The outcome of Rouy and Eyal’s combined perspectives was a visionary live event with exacting, rigorous and yet liberated practices in movement, light, sound and environment.

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. 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.