George Rouy

REPRISE

10 September – 17 October

New York, 22nd Street

Opening Reception

Thursday 10 September, 6 – 8 pm

Dates

10 September – 17 October 2026

Location

New York, 22nd Street Directions

Materials

Press Release

Artwork Inquiry

REPRISE, the latest body of work by London-based artist George Rouy, is the subject of a pair of sequential exhibitions—at Hannah Barry Gallery (4 June – 12 September) and at Hauser & Wirth New York—that spotlight the artist’s ongoing, helictical exploration of the human body in states of transformation, reconstruction and becoming.

For Rouy, reprise—the return of an image, gesture or theme through variations—is a vehicle for understanding how meaning is produced and renewed. In contemporary life at large, images circulate, are sampled, repeated, and reworked, accruing new associations while shedding others. Rouy approaches painting similarly, working with recurring motifs, symbols and compositions that become sites of instability, reinvention and emergence in his paintings. Repetition operates not as a return to sameness, but as a condition of continual change and a means of resisting fixed identity and singular resolution. Within several works on view across the two exhibitions, images of the same figure, body or face, are doubled or displaced across the picture plane, captured as if moments apart. In dialogue with one another, Rouy’s paintings seem to look back at themselves, generating unstable mirrors, memory traces and physiological afterimages.

A new series of paintings, titled Procession, employs an earth-toned palette in which reds are diffused and degraded, allowing the forms to emerge as though unearthed from the painted surface. Compositionally spare, these works center on larger-than-life figures borne aloft in monumental acts of collective care. Their origins lie in such Christian iconography as the pietà and the deposition of Christ, yet Rouy’s concerns remain firmly rooted in the present: his Procession paintings hold feelings of limbo, exhaustion and fragility in tension alongside today’s urgent impulses of carrying, care and community.

While the Procession works evoke the mortal condition of flesh and blood, a separate monochrome series of silver, graphite and charcoal canvases, which he calls Phantom paintings, turns toward the immaterial—the spectral, the atmospheric and the elusive where anatomy is suggested, then withdrawn. The paintings expose opposing states—solitude and collectivity, movement and stillness, exposure and obscurity.

Another series of works, Unknown, comprises smaller paintings of fabricated account identities used by bots. Rather than direct commentaries on artificial intelligence, Rouy intends these as anti-portraits: autonomous nonentities generated without stable origin or natural referent. Though devoid of actual biography or lived experience, these painted faces nonetheless elicit instinctive emotional responses, revealing our impulse to attribute feeling, intention and identity to images with no human subject behind them.

Throughout REPRISE, the human body appears as an unstable carrier of memory, sensation and transference, continually oscillating between recurrence and reinvention. Across the exhibition, Rouy approaches the figure not as a fixed individual but as a mutable and collective form through which shared physiological and psychological experience can be explored. For Rouy, repetition and metamorphosis are not simply artistic strategies but essential processes by which memory, identity and embodied experience continually survive, evolve and take new shape.

Installation Views

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About the Artist

George Rouy

George Rouy is recognised as a leading figure in a new generation of international artists. His dynamic and signature use of the human figure, vexed with desire, freedom, alienation and crisis, speaks to the extremities of our time. Bodies - captured alone, gathered in quiet groups, or imprisoned in crowds of amorphous energy - move from absorption and poise to expansive forces of incitement and charge.

Together they present rhapsodic explorations of mass, movement and identity in a globalised and technologically driven 21st century, alluding to recurring themes of figure and phantom, landscape and anatomy, faces and masks. This bold and subversive corporeal language captures the grave beauty and perpetual transformation of our contemporary moment. Articulating a vocabulary of painting as distinctive as it is visceral, Rouy’s works are defined by contradictions: stasis and flow, precision and indeterminacy, chaos and harmony.

All his work is an ongoing inquiry into the body and the body as a landscape, an ongoing deconstruction of the image towards an expression of the human body in the throes of becoming, reconstruction and reformation. His painterly language embraces at once extreme figuration and pure abstraction to capture the perpetual transformations of the body in our contemporary moment. His work undermines the perception of the body as a fixed unit, proposing instead a body that he has described as “at war with itself”, that constantly imagines and defines itself through its relationship with itself, with others and with the world at large.

George Rouy (b. 1994, Sittingbourne, Kent, UK). Lives and works in Faversham, Kent. Since graduating from Camberwell College of Arts in 2016, he has exhibited internationally, including: Copistes, a collaborative exhibition between the Musée du Louvre and Centre Pompidou-Metz, Paris, France (2025); States of Being, Société, Berlin, Germany (2025); Visions of the World, Kampa Museum, Prague, Czech Republic (2025); The Bleed, Part II, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles CA (2025); The Bleed, Part I, Hauser & Wirth, London, UK (2024); Present Tense, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, UK (2024); The Echo of Picasso, Museo Picasso Málaga, Málaga, Spain (2023); Endless Song, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York NY (2023); BODYSUIT, Hannah Barry Gallery, London, UK (2023); Belly Ache, Almine Rech, Paris, France (2022); Real Corporeal, Gladstone Gallery, New York NY (2022); A Thing for the Mind, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, UK (2022); Shit Mirror, Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany (2022); Rested, Nicola Vassell, New York NY (2021); Clot, Hannah Barry Gallery, London, UK (2020) and Squeeze Hard Enough It Might Just Pop!, Hannah Barry Gallery, London, UK (2018).

His work is represented in the collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), San Francisco CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles CA; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix AZ; Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley CA; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Miami FL; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, France; The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna, Austria; Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria; Stahl Collection, Norrkoping, Sweden; M Woods, Beijing, China; X Museum, Beijing, China; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China.

The live creation, BODYSUIT, produced in collaboration with choreographer Sharon Eyal and original music composed by Rouy, premiered at Hannah Barry Gallery, London in 2023. BODYSUIT was reimagined with new choreography and a new arrangement of the music for an expanded version of the piece in 2024, and the World Premiere took place at Wapping Power Station, London, UK and Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles CA in 2025.

The first monograph of his work George Rouy Selected Works 2017-2023, with a text by Charlie Mills, was published by Tarmac Press in 2023.

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