George Rouy (b. 1994, Kent, UK) lives and works in London. Rouy’s approach to the body - and his pursuit of painting - is one of contradiction, harmony and perpetual transformation, criss-crossing gender, form and disposition. His work is a fever dream of amorphous, fluid embodiment: rhapsodic portraits of 21st century desire, of physical dissonance, mystery and secrecy, ecstasy and turmoil, proximity and distance.
The work is liberated from established ways of being. In its place is an examination of the psychic effects of what encounters mean and feel like, drawing equally on the here-and-now, digital culture and the industrial advances of our age, as they do from primordial expression and the classical demands of colour and form.
The human figure has long preoccupied artists of all times; its story dominates the history of art. In its imagination and in its image-making we find clues to how artists have grappled and engaged with the political and socio-cultural moods and attitudes of their moment. We are in a time of renewed and committed interest in figurative painting and Rouy uses the figure - constrained and liberated - as many-sided prism to examine and interrogate the contemporary crucibles of gender, fiction and technology.