All sorts of secret, shocking things happen behind closed doors, but they probably pale in comparison to what’s happening behind the saloon-style screens in Mexican artist Pia Camil’s debut UK exhibition. Swing them open and you’re greeted with eye-popping paintings of lust and sexual freedom. A demonic, fanged creature humps away at a blindfolded woman in one, a blue-skinned being with a curly little pig’s tail performs cunnilingus on another.
Everywhere you look there are bodies writhing in ecstasy, hair being pulled, stilettos being pressed into bare skin. Most of the time when you see sexual art these days it carries a big political message about exploitation and abuse, but this is the opposite: this is about the joy of sex, about liberation through desire, about a feminist reclamation of eroticism. In the middle of the room, a huge inflatable sculpture of Lady Godiva inflates and deflates, rises and falls, over and over.
The whole show is like all your favourite erotic surrealists put through a Mexican art filter. It’s shocking art, not because of the strap-ons and genitalia, but because it’s so rare to see a painter this fun, an artist so obviously and totally devoted to pleasure, hedonism and joy. The end is nigh in Mark Leckey’s latest video work.
The influential English conceptualist has gone all apocalyptic, with a wild found-footage video that draws parallels between medieval cultists, 60s hippy freak-out gigs and millennial raves. It all starts with a renaissance painting by Uccello, which sends Leckey’s brain tripping across doom-mongering conspiracy theories, biblical prophecies and stock market crashes. It’s freeform and weird, almost unfollowable, but also pretty mesmerising.
The film is unfinished, and it’s housed in a barren gallery in an abandoned former hospital, but this is exactly what you want from this kind of project space: challenging, strange, totally uncompromising and blatantly uncommercial art. These kinds of places give room for art and ideas to bloom and evolve, and are becoming rarer and rarer. The shows here are by appointment only – you message them through their Instagram – but you have to take advantage of experimental art spaces while they’re still around.
Doom and gloom never felt so hypnotic. Marcin Dudek has become an archaeologist of the self, digging through his past, his memories, trying to figure out how it all came to this. His work has always been largely based on the Polish housing estate he grew up in: the basement gyms and football violence that marked his childhood and youth.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
