September 12-November 22, Michael Werner Gallery

Curated by Hilton Als

‘I don’t like your looking-glass…Have you ever noticed how different some looking-glasses make you look?’ - Anna Morgan, Voyage in the Dark

Jean Rhys understood what it was to live within a body. She knew the intimate, awkward, grotesque of the human form. She often writes of reflection–a body projected back to its viewer. The dysmorphic, contorted nature of skin wrapped around the mystical innards of a person unravels to reveal the disembodied, invisible soul. How do personal histories and feelings of displacement store within and manifest through the physical self? This is the question that seems to weave through the group exhibition that Hilton Als has curated at Michael Werner. The works selected by Als create an amalgamated portrait of the post-modernist novelist Jean Rhys: her literary sensibilities, her cultural legacy, and her fractured relationship to place—somewhere between her childhood home of Dominica and her adult life spent in England.

Leon Kossoff’s Seated Nude No. 1 from 1963 embodies the disembodiment that Rhys writes of in her literary work. Kossoff’s nude figure is executed with thick slabs of paint, they warp and spiral on the canvas, creating the suggestion of a body; sack-like and gelatinous, sprawled for viewership. Bodily contortion is further foregrounded throughout the gallery by various sculptural objects, namely Sarah Lucas’ NUD 16 from 2009. This pillowed, malleable tube of material is coiled and knotted. It is the fleshy nature of the object that evokes the image of an entangled body, wound into itself. The exhibition is not simply an array of abstracted, contemporary works. Als juxtaposes these artistic displays of bodily discomfort with archival photographs, portraits, and imagery. In doing so, he effectively crafts a visual narrative that represents Jean Rhys’ tether to and longing for her Dominican home punctuated by the feelings of unease and malaise she felt throughout young adulthood onward in England.

Michael Werner Gallery serves as a poignant backdrop for this exhibition. Its high ceilings, elaborately detailed banisters of dark wood, and lush maroon carpets are quintessentially English. Both the contemporary works and the archival reside somewhat uncomfortably within the walls of the historic home. Curatorially, Als himself acts as portraiture, a sculptor of Rhys’ internal and external experience. She lived in England, but she compulsively turned to her former home of Dominica as a source of true identity and belonging. Despite Rhys’ Welsh and Creole descent, her whiteness did not evade the Othering she felt in England. Because of her upbringing and accent from Dominica, the streets of London were no home to her. This exhibition is a relevant one. Displacement and disjunct identity are feelings familiar to many. Perhaps Jean Rhys can act as the mirror she so often writes of: How does one place-make? What do feelings of exclusion incite within the body, and within the soul? How do we craft inclusive spaces of the in-between? It is clear that Als has sought to answer these questions through Postures, and has crafted a space of in-between, with Rhys at the center.

Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World is on until the 22nd of November at Michael Werner Gallery in Mayfair, London.

Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World

September 12-November 22, Michael Werner Gallery

Junyi Lu: (cossett)