Saturday, September 18th from 11am – 8pm experience the Opening Reception of BREACH gallery’s new exhibition ‘Oh Baby’. On view through October 16, 2021. The group exhibition “Oh baby” with the artists Giorgio Ermes Celin, Melissa Floyd, Fatima de Juan, Julien Jaca and Emily Manwaring deals with the physical themes of sexuality, love relationships, nudity and sensuality in contemporary painting.
At first, the perspectives seem very different. Fatima de Juan paints doll-like stylised dark women who fulfill clichés and yet seem so surreal, as if the animal-like warriors came from distant planets. As heroic badges, they gather feminine curves to themselves. Melissa Floyd deals with hypersexualised, vulgar self-portraits on social networks. Her images of people distort proportions even further, exaggerate, inflate, until not only the face but the whole person becomes a grimace, ultimately revealing a loose, vital colour surface painting. Giorgio Ermes Celin stages (homosexual) relationships in intertwined and twisted body systems. The arms, hands, fingers and other body parts flow into each other like melting ice. Julien Jaca is dedicated to the French tradition of female nude models in painting. Inspired by Paul Gaugin, he sets patterns, textiles, tattoos and skin in a naively exotic interior cubism. Emily Manwaring‘s pictorial worlds open up a romantic pop world of the 80s and 90s, in which the sometimes playful and sometimes sensual body consciousness of black women, teenagers and children takes centre stage.