GROUP EXHIBITION

The title comes from the exhibition’s earliest work, a Lucian Freud drawing made during the first winter of World War II, which the young artist spent in Wales in rooms rented from a retired coal miner. Along with his friend from art school David Kentish and the poet Stephen Spender, the eighteen-year-old Freud spent his days largely confined to the house.

In this moment when many of us are spending an unprecedented amount of time at home, the works in Home Life ruminate on domesticity in its many forms, from accumulating piles of clothes to the way the sunlight hits the floor at a certain time each day.

Alex Da Corte’s Helter Shelter (2020), a large-scale painting of an exploding house, is based on a drawing by the American artist Henry Darger. Window, Curtain, Matches (2020) is the most recent work from Robert Gober’s series of wall-mounted vitrines, which see the artist returning to some of his earliest imagery and motifs. Clothes pile (2020) is a portrait of Charles Ray’s own clothes, a recurring subject for the artist since the early 1970s. Ray began this aluminium sculpture more than fifteen years ago, ultimately completing it with a laser sintering process, which helped achieve an intricacy that could not be produced with casting or carving.

Home Life is on view by appointment at 523 West 24^th Street from 29 January to 20 March, 2021. For additional information, please contact Beau Rutland at 212-243-0200 or beau@matthewmarks.com.