Embodied Forms: Painting Now brings together new works by seven artists who reconfigure the relationship between subjectivity and the body, interrogating how its complexities are given form in painting today. Encompassing diverse material, stylistic and conceptual approaches, the exhibition features works by a group of international artists: Carolina Aguirre, Dean Fox, Olga Grotova, Michael Ho, Effie Wanyi Li, YaYa Yajie Liang and Eva Helene Pade. Themes emerge and commingle across the exhibition, with the relationship between bodies and their environments – whether narrative and/or painterly – standing at the fore.

While figurative traditions run as a rich seam through art history, today art has become an essential means for reimagining how embodiment is expressed and perceived. Embodiment intimately entwines the corporeal with the emotional, the psychological and the sensory, and makes apparent our interconnections with other forces – be they human, animal, ecological or technological. The body is no longer conceived as a self-contained object. Its borders have become porous, or have evaporated entirely, to propose new ways of inhabiting the world rooted in collaboration and kinship.

Embodied Forms invites us to move between the metamorphosing bodies, corporeal interiors and liminal landscapes brought into being across the works of the seven artists.