REBECCA WARREN

Consisting of a group of life-size, hand-painted bronze female figures –nude or partially clothed – these new works operate along a scale offleshy realism at one end, to anatomical waywardness and extremesurface turbulence at the other. Deviations from the norms of anatomyinclude supernumerary limbs, rampantly burgeoned hands, and strangeoutgrowths that might be outlandish hairdos or unexpected handles.Additionally the paintwork by turns emphasises and blurs distinctionsbetween flesh and clothes, or suggests other kinds of ornamentalsurfaces.

This group of sculptures recalls an earlier group that Warren producedin 2003, for which she gained wide notice. Collectively titled SHE, thatexhibition similarly consisted of several life-size female figures – thoughmade in unpainted, unfired clay – with their anatomies pushed toextremes of comic and bathetic implausibility.

Her new work revisits and develops these ideas, narrowing andrefining the differences between natural forms and postures, and thedeformations and exaggerations towards which they might be pushed.The drive is to produce strange and unique beings with particular kindsof presences and purposes. Warren says of these variations that ‘theyare in search of human mood, and the uncanny lifelikeness andhumanity that survives even when the sculptures are pushed into weirdabstraction’ and that ‘it’s tricky to be serious about art, to notautomatically go for the easy answer. Art should be exposing, seriouslyworrying to get right – it’s there that the genuinely moving can occur,and the genuinely funny if it needs to.’