In this talk, drawing on the history of painting and his own practice, artist George Rouy will speak about the relationship between artistic process, image making and the human figure. Finally, with special attention to Delacroix’s ‘Massacre at Chios’, Rouy will pose the question of what our relationship is with landscapes today, and how the visual arts might help us investigate this topic.
Introduction by Nikolaj Schultz. The talk is part of the Life Terrains lecture series.
Bio
Emerging as a leading figure of the new generation of painters, George Rouy’s (1994- ) dynamic and signature use of the human figure, in relation to the space it occupies, vexed with desire, alienation and crisis, speaks to the extremities of our time – from intensive properties of temperature, density and speed to extensive forms of mass, volume and entropy.
His lines of artistic inquiry – collective mass, multiplicity and movement – result in explorations of identity and embodiment, disorder, disorientation and disturbance in the 21st Century. Articulating a vocabulary of painting which is as distinctive as it is visceral, Rouy’s paintings are defined by contradictions: stasis and flow, precision and indeterminacy.
Working in this manner, he undermines the body and its landscape as fixed units, proposing instead a landscape of the body that he has described as “at war with itself”, one that constantly imagines and redefines itself through its relationship with itself, with others and with the world at large.
Following his highly acclaimed recent solo exhibitions BLEED I and BLEED II in London and Los Angeles (Hauser & Wirth), Rouy is currently working on a new painting for ‘Copistes’ a collaborative exhibition between the Musée du Louvre and Centre Pompidou-Metz, inspired by “The Massacre at Chios” by Eugene Delacroix in the collection of the Louvre, Paris.
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