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.
His live creation, BODYSUIT, 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.
