The Nakeds
25 September 2014 – 29 November 2014
David Austen, Fiona Banner, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, George Condo, Enrico David, Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Leon Golub, Stewart Helm, Chantal Joffe, Maria Lassnig, Paul McCarthy, Chris Ofili, Carol Rama, Egon Schiele, Nancy Spero, Georgina Starr, Alina Szapocznikow, Rosemarie Trockel, Nicola Tyson, Andy Warhol and Franz West.
A group exhibition looking at drawings of the body exposed. The naked body is frequently the physical terrain artists traverse in search of the inner self. How to represent love, shame, solitude and sexual yearning? Drawing from the self or life model, from reproduction or the imagination, has provided artists with the freedom to explore desires, fears and fantasies.
The Nakeds takes as its starting point selected drawings of the single figure by Egon Schiele. From here it considers work by artists from the post-war period to the present day. The exhibition will include new work made specifically by Enrico David, Stewart Helm, Chantal Joffe and Nicola Tyson.
The Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918) was a prolific and provocative draughtsman. His drawings of the body unclothed or in a state of undress are amongst the most arresting works to have emerged from Vienna in the tumultuous years around the First World War. Working at the same time as Sigmund Freud, in the birthplace of modern psychiatry, the artist was attacked and acclaimed in his short lifetime. Still dividing opinion today, his drawings tested long-held distinctions between the ‘nude’ and the ‘naked’, art and pornography. The exhibition seeks to explore this contested terrain.
Alina Szapocznikow, born in 1926 in Kalisz, held a unique position in the post-war European avant-garde. In the 1960s and early 1970s, she was one of the first artists to experiment with polyester, which she used to cast parts of her face and body to montage them into grotesque and sexually charged assemblages. Szapocznikow’s oeuvre spans a continuously productive period from the 1950s to her untimely death in 1973. Her drawings and sculptures represent an previously unseen fusion of a late dark Surrealism with the bright and sexually provocative side of Pop-Art. (source of the bio note: www.polishculture-nyc.org)
Drawing Room thank the School of Humanities, Music and the Performing Arts, and ‘Innovation for the Creative and Cultural Industries’, Plymouth University for their support of the catalogue and contribution to Gemma Blackshaw’s research. We thank the Polish Cultural Institute and Paulina Latham, Head of Events and Visual Arts, for their support of the inclusion of the work of Alina Sczapochnikow. We thank our Patrons Miel de Botton, Brian Boylan and Veronique Parke for their generous and vital support of this exhibition