Isabelle Albuquerque
Curated by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
— “Leda and the Swan,” William Butler Yeats, 1923
SKIN STEALERS is an exhibition of figurative artists who inhabit the bodies of others, documenting, bearing witness to, and forcing themselves into their subjects’ more intimate and occasionally dangerous behaviors. The exhibition emerges from the respective wombs of two large paintings: Keith Haring’s massive, pregnant female form, and Hugo Wilson’s Boschian (or perhaps Rube Goldbergian) machination of an organic, sexless conception and birth. Isabelle Albuquerque casts her own skin in bronze in the role of Leda from “Leda and the Swan”—in her telling, Zeus assumes the shape of a violating saxophone—while Dominique Fung’s similarly headless, nude figure grasps, strangles, and beheads a bevy of ill-intentioned fowl. Devin B. Johnson inhabits the body of a mother turning a blind-eye to her chubby, sock and diaper-clad child as he wanders into Philipp Kremer’s orgy of primary and secondary colors, and Georgina Gratrix’s textured, playfully layered portraits look-on in amusement. Mattia Biagi’s animated black cats scurry throughout the proceedings, simultaneously picking up scraps with the roombas that carry them and altering the luck of all who enter. Watching it all from a safe distance is Robert Yarber’s naughty voyeur, emerging from her black underpainting with a cocktail and a pair of binoculars.
Apart from Keith Haring’s pieces, all works are 2018–2019 and created specifically for SKIN STEALERS.
