Flesh

I managed to get over to York Art Gallery this week to catch the wonderful ‘Flesh’ exhibition. It is open until the 19^th of March and any of you with an interest in making images and marks on a flat surface that could be regarded as a skin would find this a fascinating exhibition.

There is an interesting distinction between the way we use the words ‘flesh’ and ‘skin’. ‘Flesh’ suggests that thickness and substance that is better suggested by paint, and ‘skin’ the thinness and surface quality that has a much closer affinity to drawing. The exhibition focuses more on painting than drawing, but there is enough work in the exhibition to begin to open out a whole range of thoughts about how both painting and drawing use the surface of the body to operate as metaphors for mortality.

I have posted on the relationship between drawing and skin in the past, see.

There are several artists in this exhibition that I would pick out as being good research starting points in terms of drawing and mortality.  Berlinde de Bruyckere’s work can feel almost medieval in its sensitivity to death and mortality, but it is made contemporary by her sensitivity to her materials and her eye for an image.  Her drawings in pencil or charcoal often have small areas tinted in red or violet and by keeping the colour to restricted patches she seems more able to suggest the chilling atmosphere of the charnel house.

Berlinde de Bruyckere

The Hanabusa Itcho images of the death of a noble lady were a very powerful sequence and reminded me that small delicate images can sometimes be much more powerful than large bombastic images trying to work too hard to impress the viewer. These images work as a sequence, each image framed as an image in its own right, but when displayed together they tell the whole story. As an artist very interested in narrative I was intrigued to see how this idea was developed long before the arrival of the comic strip.

Hanabusa Itcho: First image in a series of 9

There were examples of tattoos still kept on their preserved skins, a concept that is on the one hand rather morbid and yet on the other hand a powerful reminder of the significance of all the surfaces and supports that we find drawings made upon. We so rarely comment on the type of paper supporting drawings, tending to talk more about the image or the materials used in the drawing, but when you make the support so emotionally powerful, the relative importance of support to image swaps places. Edward Lipski's drawings on pig hide, shaped into an oversize human torso is a work that clearly illustrates this point.  

Edward Lipski

Two images from Jonathan Yeo’s Surgery Series including his Secondary Augmentation-Mastopexy, are on display. In the Mastopexy painting we have a range of issues moving backwards and forwards between drawing and painting. The painting depicts a drawing drawn on a woman’s body to help surgeons in locating where they need to cut into the body in order to perform an operation. However the painting is not worked right up to the edges of the canvas, therefore the under-drawing is not covered and is clearly seen. The underlying drawn grid is in evidence and reminds us of the relationship between the grid and how artists both use it as a measuring device and as a method of copying and transferring images. We are reminded of a much earlier Renaissance idea of the relationship between drawing and painting, that is that drawing was regarded as the unifying practice of all the visual arts, disegno in Italian meaning both “drawing” and “design”. Of course the Renaissance also found artists for the first time becoming interested in anatomy and for centuries afterwards anatomy was going to be a central component of an artist’s education, Yeo’s painting therefore asks questions that combine both historical and contemporary reflections on the body as a site for both medical and artistic attention.

Jonathan Yeo

These reflections just touch the surface of what is a very powerful exhibition, which also features works by Lucian Freud, Auguste Rodin, Helen Chadwick, Jenny Saville, Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon and Sarah Lucas as well as featuring Sam Taylor-Johnson's 'A Little Death' which is a very powerful film commenting on the nature of still-life painting. 

Find more about the exhibition here.

N.b. There is an entrance fee of £7, so be prepared for this. 

See also:

Paper and skin