Embodied Forms: Painting Now
Embodied Forms: Painting Now brings together new works by seven artists who reconfigure the relationship between subjectivity and the body, interrogating how its complexities are given form in painting today.
Encompassing diverse material, stylistic and conceptual approaches, the exhibition features works by a group of international artists: Carolina Aguirre, Dean Fox, Olga Grotova, Michael Ho, Effie Wanyi Li, YaYa Yajie Liang and Eva Helene Pade. Themes emerge and commingle across the exhibition, with the relationship between bodies and their environments – whether narrative and/or painterly – standing at the fore.
While figurative traditions run as a rich seam through art history, today art has become an essential means for reimagining how embodiment is expressed and perceived. Embodiment intimately entwines the corporeal with the emotional, the psychological and the sensory, and makes apparent our interconnections with other forces – be they human, animal, ecological or technological. The body is no longer conceived
as a self-contained object. Its borders have become porous, or have evaporated entirely, to propose new ways of inhabiting the world rooted in collaboration and kinship.
Also seeking to dissolve distinctions between internal and external states of being, Effie Wanyi Li (b.1995; Shenzhen, China) takes up the act of painting to materialise visceral landscapes in which psychological and emotional impulses are entwined with physical sensation. Through her use of highcontrast shadow and highlight, Li creates a sense of perspectival depth to spatialise her embodied experiences on canvas. Articulated in fleshy, bruised palettes, biomorphic structures suggest the forms of internal organs, even while they twist and metamorphose into topographical features and floral motifs. Our eye is directed across the surface of the works by lines that weave through these knotted forms, navigate the deep voids that recede into the distance and brush across the whispering tendrils that give form to Li’s conception of embodied experience.
Encompassing diverse material, stylistic and conceptual approaches, the exhibition features works by a group of international artists: Carolina Aguirre, Dean Fox, Olga Grotova, Michael Ho, Effie Wanyi Li, YaYa Yajie Liang and Eva Helene Pade. Themes emerge and commingle across the exhibition, with the relationship between bodies and their environments – whether narrative and/or painterly – standing at the fore.
While figurative traditions run as a rich seam through art history, today art has become an essential means for reimagining how embodiment is expressed and perceived. Embodiment intimately entwines the corporeal with the emotional, the psychological and the sensory, and makes apparent our interconnections with other forces – be they human, animal, ecological or technological. The body is no longer conceived
as a self-contained object. Its borders have become porous, or have evaporated entirely, to propose new ways of inhabiting the world rooted in collaboration and kinship.
Also seeking to dissolve distinctions between internal and external states of being, Effie Wanyi Li (b.1995; Shenzhen, China) takes up the act of painting to materialise visceral landscapes in which psychological and emotional impulses are entwined with physical sensation. Through her use of highcontrast shadow and highlight, Li creates a sense of perspectival depth to spatialise her embodied experiences on canvas. Articulated in fleshy, bruised palettes, biomorphic structures suggest the forms of internal organs, even while they twist and metamorphose into topographical features and floral motifs. Our eye is directed across the surface of the works by lines that weave through these knotted forms, navigate the deep voids that recede into the distance and brush across the whispering tendrils that give form to Li’s conception of embodied experience.
