The Body Speaks
10th January, 2025 – 4th February, 2025
Guts Gallery
Unit 2 Sidings House
10 Andre Street
London, E8 2AA
Guts Gallery is incredibly excited to present The Body Speaks, a group exhibition that explores how distortion in figuration can be used to plumb the depths of the human psyche. In The Body Speaks, the human figure takes centre stage.
Throughout the exhibition, artists experiment with form, colour, and gestural mark-making to imbue the human figure with the power to express what is usually kept hidden within. Here, inner conflicts, trauma, memories, dreams, and nightmares are transmuted into the visual world and given language through the disruption of the physical body.
Courtesy of Guts Gallery (@guts_gallery).
Photography Courtesy of Studio Adamson (@studio_adamson)
In one work, two bodies merge and disappear into one another through an act of violent struggle. In another, lustrous, satin-like skin shudders and swells into balloon-like, billowing forms. Elsewhere, a physical form begins to ooze and spread across the composition as if it were viewed through a distorted glass.
In a different work, an outstretched limb effaces itself and evolves into scratchy, bewildering abstraction on the canvas. From this, it is clear that the bodies within The Body Speaks are not quite stable. They are not closed-off, finished units. Instead, they are ever-changing, visual manifestations of the artist coming to terms with the constant, mystifying fluctuations of human emotion.
Courtesy of Guts Gallery (@guts_gallery).
Photography Courtesy of Studio Adamson (@studio_adamson)
Each work within The Body Speaks depicts the human form on the precipice. Throughout the show, flfleshy fifigures squirm, writhe, and contort themselves into entirely new bodily configurations. The viewer watches as each molten form begins to soften, seep, and overflow its own boundaries before finally coagulating and fusing the disparate parts together once again. As a result, the bodies depicted within The Body Speaks seem to be permanently on the brink of total metamorphosis, as if the artist has captured the swirling, seething stages before a new, altered form is brought into existence.
Exhibiting Artists: Shadi Al-Atallah, Vanessa Liem, Yi Liu, Georgia Semple, Elsa Rouy
The Body Speaks opens on the 10th of January, 2025 until the 4th of February, 2025 at GUTS GALLERY
©2025 Guts Gallery
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