On view: October 26 – December 7, 2019
Isabelle Albuquerque / Mattia Biagi / Dominique Fung / Georgina Gratrix / Keith Haring / Devin B. Johnson / Philipp Kremer / Hugo Wilson / Robert Yarber
Curated by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler
SKIN STEALERS is an exhibition of figurative artists who inhabit the bodies of others, documenting, bearing witness to, and forcing themselves into their subjects’ more intimate and occasionally dangerous behaviors. The exhibition emerges from the respective wombs of two large paintings: Keith Haring’s massive, pregnant female form, and Hugo Wilson’s Boschian (or perhaps Rube Goldbergian) machination of an organic, sexless conception and birth. Isabelle Albuquerque casts her own skin in bronze in the role of Leda from “Leda and the Swan”—in her telling, Zeus assumes the shape of a violating saxophone—while Dominique Fung’s similarly headless, nude figure grasps, strangles, and beheads a bevy of ill-intentioned fowl. Devin B. Johnson inhabits the body of a mother turning a blind-eye to her chubby, sock and diaper-clad child as he wanders into Philipp Kremer’s orgy of primary and secondary colors, and Georgina Gratrix’s textured, playfully layered portraits look-on in amusement. Mattia Biagi’s animated black cats scurry throughout the proceedings, simultaneously picking up scraps with the roombas that carry them and altering the luck of all who enter. Watching it all from a safe distance is Robert Yarber’s naughty voyeur, emerging from her black underpainting with a cocktail and a pair of binoculars.
Apart from Keith Haring’s ‘Untitled’, 1983, all works are 2019 and created specifically for SKIN STEALERS.
