Featuring works by Eleni Bagaki, Chloe Beddow, Beth McAlester, Heeyoung Noh, Boo Saville and Nina Silverberg.
67 Great Titchfield St, W1W 7PT
Whether cropped, anonymised or conspicuous in its absence, The Tagli's latest group
exhibition 'On the Conditions of Bodily Presence' presents six unique, contemporary
responses to the predominant position of the figure within representational art-making.
Considering both cerebral and corporeal interpretations of our human presence and present, the assembled artists address identity, intimacy, accessibility, eroticism and emotional or physical vulnerability across painterly, photographic and sculptural contemplations or compositions of the body.
Working from both found photographs and her own personal archive, Eleni Bagaki's (b.
1979, Crete) hand-transferred images on aluminium are closely cropped as if to imitate,
imply or otherwise affect intimacy, with each solitary figure anonymised, perhaps to allow
easier objectification. Manually manipulating each metal panel prior to printing, she attempts to somewhat soften the aluminium's sleek, untarnished surface, leaving a human mark, a sign of vulnerability of fallibility. Neither clearly public nor private, explicitly personal, generic or imaged, Bagaki questions who, why and how we desire, whilst establishing a voyeuristic, ménage à trois relationship between artist, subject and audience. Potentially ambiguous in their gender presentation, her subjects allow for a projection of female subjectivity and sexuality, examining the canonical gaze in art history and the established expectation of the female artist or image maker.
Similarly sourcing images online, from the deepest depths of internet searches and research rabbit holes, Boo Saville's (b.1980, Norwich) muted, mostly monochromatic portraits provide respite and quiet contemplation from her parallel painting practice of large, abstract, colour-field compositions. Considering the conceptual importance of pathos, perception, memory and dispassion, her fading, sepia-stained figures serve as studies in surface, the warp and weft of the canvas weave everpresent as it plays host to the artist's transient, fleeting depictions. Despite titles such as Hedone - the daughter of Eros and Psyche in Greek mythology, personified as pleasure - Saville's cropped faces, torsos and rears resist a didactic narrative interpretation, reflecting the fleeting status of their found snapshot starting point.
Memory likewise acts as a looming presence in the practice of Beth McAlester (b. 2003, Northern Ireland), her paintings of supposedly mundane, everyday objects or domestic environments informed by her own upbringing, born into a post-troubles Northern Ireland. Working on found, pre-distressed wooden panels, her images are infected by the natural degradation of their surface, adopting each scratch, scar, gouge and grain as further material context for their composition. Scenes and settings are charged with inherited, generational trauma, as a society struggles to come to terms with its embedded collective memory and McAlester attempts to reconcile her position as a both post-troubles 'ceasefire-baby' and an artist hoping to reclaim and recontextualise each image whilst honouring their original purpose, past and place.
The figure is similarly and notably absent in Chloe Beddow's (b. 1999, London) sculptural, digital paintings, as she works to expose the inherent, ableist biases that might otherwise go overlooked. Casting a critical eye over the body's relationship to space, she exposes how certain surroundings and situations could all too easily allow for a lack of visibility of certain members of society. By marrying structural, quotidian images with digital methods of making and seemingly idiosyncratic material choices, Beddow's works demand and awareness oftheir own environment, revealing how visual awareness can be conditioned by prior expectation or past experience and remaking the world around us to give agency to those previously felt unseen or othered.
In bodies frailty and fragility is also foregrounded by Nina Silverberg (b. 1994, Rome), through paintings depicting symbols that imply or evoke ideas of human care and comfort. With her small-scale works retaining a charged, sentimental energy, intimacy is evidenced through solitary, isolated vignettes that indicate a rich relationship between our interior world and our exterior environment. Often portrayed as illustrations within books - themselves inviting escape into that aforementioned cerebral realm - sickbeds, cityscapes and solitary buildings become symbolic stand-ins for physical portraiture. Gloves await absence wearers, ready to offer protection and solace to the fashion-forward mysophobe, as droplets invade or obscure Silverberg's scenes, perhaps teardrops from an unseen observer or a final rainswept act of prophetic fallacy.
Similar droplets cling to Heeyoung Noh's (b.1995, Incheon, South Korea) nude, anonymised, female figures, as they epitomise the complexities and precarities of diasporic identity, reflecting her own lived experience of otherness as an East Asian woman residing in Scotland. Taking place amongst ttaemiri - communal Korean bathhouse culture that arose under Japanese colonial rule in response to accusations of being unclean and uncouth - Noh explores the generational trauma bonds that exist amongst a family's female lineage. Her water droplets serve as a visual simile for these subconscious scars of systemic, state-sponsored oppression and a pervading, patriarchal social structure, silently passed down from grandmothers to mothers, mothers to daughters during each scrubbing session.
Ultimately, 'On the Conditions of Bodily Presence' reframes representational figuration as something neither stagnant nor sanctified, instead embracing fractured, fallible or even entirely intangible corporeal observations. Here, the body is positioned as both site and subject, proposing presence - and absence - as a continuously changeable condition, one mediated by the various visibilities or vulnerabilities of surface, spectator and self.
Text written by Hector Campbell
This exhibition is kindly sponsored by Flight Logistics.
