About

Private view Strictly under invitation : [email protected]

Radu Oreian (1984, Romania) half way in his residency with the gallery in Marseille aside of our current show welcomes us for an open studio. For Oreian, flesh, and most notably, minced meat, have come to represent the way in which we engage with the endless flow of information that surrounds us today. While social media is a phenomenon of our modern age though, flesh is a subject that has fascinated artists for centuries. Dead or alive, human or animal, flesh has been the focus of some of art history's most powerful and provocative works. We might turn our thoughts to the contorted body and savaged skin of of Grunewald's Christ in The Isenheim Altarpiece, or to Titian, renowned for being 'the painter of flesh' and for glazing his works with up to sixty layers of paint in his attempts to accurately reflect the colours of the body. In 'Slaughtered Ox', attributed to the circle of Rembrandt, the flesh of the dead animal dominates the centre ground of the painting, and more recently, in his portrait Henrietta Moraes on a Blue Couch, Francis Bacon's protagonist more closely resembles a carcass than a woman. For Bacon: 'Flesh and meat are life! If I paint red meat as I paint bodies; it is just because I find it very beautiful.'