George Rouy: The Bleed, Part I

7 Oct-21 Dec 2024

Overview

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 feature a new body of work continuing his inquiry into collective mass, multiplicities and movement, and human modes of existence. 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 in a globalized, technologically driven 21st Century.

Amongst the themes Rouy explored in these new works is the idea of ‘carrying;’ how we are carried into life and eventually carried out of life. The works are considering collective care, how we care for each other from birth until death; how our lives are a sequence of experiences of balance and unease; feelings of being carried, or feeling the opposite—being dropped. What happens to the mass of individuals placed into surrounding space.

‘The bleed’ is a term Rouy uses in relation to the surrounds of the figures; the relationship between figure and void and how those two realms interact in terms of the surface of the paintings: a physical seeping, blending and merging. ‘The surrounds’ refers to the place where the flesh and inner parts of the body meet its surrounding conditions—temperature, heat, etc.

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.

Accompanying the exhibition, our Learning program will involve the artist himself, engaging learners with his work. This includes an ‘Educators Evening’ on Thursday 7 November.