LOOKING AT TIGERS - Private View

A pop-up solo exhibition of paintings by artist Gavin Maughfling.

Starting from a reflection on Francis Bacons’ s ‘Two Figures in the Grass’, these works ask if a painting’s viewer can be pulled through the canvas surface, so that they are simultaneously one or more of the protagonists in the scene, while also being an observer looking on from outside the picture frame. This duality mirrors of the way in which we experience our own lived reality, being both inside our interactions while at the same time being able to look at ourselves from the outside, questioning how the scene would seem to us, or to a real or imagined other. The paintings hover on the boundary of this apparent pictorial paradox, and the process of their making is the search for a seemingly impossible solution.

The arenas in which the paintings take place range from the bedroom and the act of sex to a lip synch from Ru Paul’s Drag Race to a family outing to Singapore Zoo. Through touch, physical gesture, colour and paint’s materiality, the works explore ideas of intimacy and the performative fantasies and power dynamics that are revealed in our love making; a sudden and unexpected moment of empathy and queer solidarity expressed between two players on a competition stage; and feelings of familial ease, affection and togetherness, seen through the retrospective lens of nostalgic loss.

This exhibition is part of Bermondsey Project Space July Pop-Up season 2024. 

 5 – 6 July 2024