Over the last fifty years or so, work depicting the body, such as paintings by British artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, was at odds with the prevailing currents of abstraction, Pop and conceptualism. Yet the figure has retained its currency, and the artists in Body Language each provide compelling evidence of the figure’s continued ability to articulate something both historically specific and curiously essential.
From the grotesque and uncanny to the poignant and satirical, the works in this exhibition examine, in arresting and innovative ways, the diverse social and political issues that can be communicated through the human body.
