November 30–December 29, 2023
Steve Turner is pleased to present The Only Daughter, a solo exhibition by London-based Elsa Rouy which features recent paintings that relate to the artist’s emotional experiences. She depicts figures that lack clear physical boundaries–different bodies melt into one another and bodily fluids drip and mingle together combining and separating the figures. Rouy is inspired by gothic literature and its themes of terror and romance. The women in her paintings are corpse-like, with cuts and ghostly or intense facial expressions. Rouy describes her works as a “visual portrayal of abstruse emotions where bodies are in a constant state of becoming, never static and always in a state of flux.” Her figures are grotesque, tender and vulnerable. Bodies with supple caressing hands engaged in transfigured sex acts are fused together as their weeping and desperate eyes stare blankly at the viewer. They convey suffering and pleasure, contortion and calm, life and death. They also convey an unknowable mystery that leaves room for viewers to use their own experiences to interpret the conflict within each work.
Elsa Rouy (born 2000, Sittingbourne, England) earned a BA at Camberwell College of the Arts, London (2021) and has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Guts Gallery, London (2020, 2021 & 2022) and Eigen + Art Lab, Berlin (2023). The Only Daughter is Rouy’s debut solo exhibition in the United States and Steve Turner will also present her work at Untitled, Miami Beach in December 2023.
