Homebody: Contemporary Figurative Art and Domestic Settings
The emotional range that these works capture is vast, conveying the uneasiness and boredom, as well as the escapism and determination that confinement provokes.
Spaces that once offered solace at the end of the day are now uncertain sites for many. Unexpected pressures arise as we are forced to work among our families, return to our childhood bedrooms, or live in isolation. Our homes continue to offer us protection, but they are not the same refuges from the outside world that they once were. In the figurative artworks collected here, artists have portrayed their subjects set against living rooms, bathrooms and bedrooms. Stuck indoors, the figures in these works are reconsidered when lockdowns have made many of us reconsider our relationship to our homes - listlessness, uncertainty and frustration mean that even our own rooms start to look alien.
Aliza Nisenbaum, Las Talaveritas, (2015)
Aliza Nisenbaum is used to painting scenes of waiting - her subjects are undocumented Latin American immigrants within the US. The observational skills of portrait painting allow her to “mark those who are socially unmarked in society.” The three women gathered on a living room sofa in ‘Las Talaveritas’ are typical of Nizenbaum’s focus on migration, but as with the rest of her work refuse to be defined by contemporary politics - instead we are presented with a family scene full of both resolve and disenchantment.
Kerry James Marshall, ‘Untitled (Upside Down Man)’, (2016)
Kerry James Marshall is a painter who is interested in the legacy of over six centuries of representational painting. Reinventing its various styles, Marshall pays particular attention to issues of composition. With the changing season displayed outside the room’s windows, Marshall’s perfectly suspended upside down man captures a moment of stasis and self-occupation.
Elif Uras, ‘Monkey,’ (2017)
Presenting wage, domestic and reproductive labour, Turkish artist Elif Uras’ work focuses on capital in the lives of women. With a practice that spans both paintings and ceramics, it is Uras’ ceramic vessels and plates that most closely align themselves with the interior domestic. Their painted surfaces are a modern parallel to the scenes of domestic activity that decorated ancient Greek pottery from the mid-fifth century BC, reflecting the uses to which those vases were put.
In ‘Monkey’, a woman attempts to work out on an exercise bike whilst the child on her back obstructs her vision. It speaks to the demands on women’s time as they are forced to take on multiple roles, and within this new context of lockdown to the difficulties of maintaining personal space for caregivers who are now confined to their homes.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, ‘Mother and Child,’ (2016)
Akunyili Crosby's art often freezes moments of the domestic experience, presenting highly composed scenes in which figures eat together or watch TV. However these familiar scenarios are quietly undercut by ambiguous gestures.
Here the figure, presumably the titular ‘Mother’, turns away from us, her gaze directed beyond the living room (with its family portrait) to the doorway. Hinting at escape, the bright yellow door correlates with the yellow sofa the figure sits upon, bringing her closer to the doors that are half-open, half-closed.
https://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/185-njideka-akunyili-crosby/
Alec Soth, ‘Nancy,’ (2017)
The portraits in Alec Soth’s ‘I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating’ mark a turn in the photographer’s work from sweeping “grand narrative” projects to the intimacy of people in their homes.
In ‘Nancy’ the isolation experienced by his subject within her home is implicit, the soft focused lens suggesting the blurring of time as Nancy waits. Soth does not simply present Nancy as a generic isolated, older woman, however, where the camera is at its sharpest reveals a cat’s ears poking out from behind its owner’s patterned pajamas - a relationship deepened by joint confinement within the home.
Kia LaBeija, ‘In My Room’, (2014)
Kia LaBeija understands how daily life can be upended by illness. Her photographic series ‘24’ focuses on the issues she faced growing up with HIV, having lost her mother to an AIDS-related illness at 14.
This is the first image in that series and sees the artist in her childhood bedroom. The details in the image contribute to LaBeija’s confirmation of her own identity at a time when she was subject to the trauma and stigma of her HIV positive status.
Audun Alvestad, ‘Between the Bed and the Rest’, (c.2018)
‘Between the Bed and the Rest’ could show the exhausted collapse of someone having returned to the comfort of their home, or it could equally show someone overcome by lethargy, unable to move off of their bed. The background’s vortex of lines lends itself to the latter’s sense of entrapment.
The artist, Audun Alvestad, regularly paints characters who he describes as “average Joe” types. His subject’s inertia is both relatable, and at odds with the dynamism of the graphic interior design.
https://kristinhjellegjerde.com/artists/158-audun-alvestad/overview/
Dayanita Singh, ‘The Ladies of Calcutta, (2008)
In response to the ethical dilemnas of her early career as a photojournalist, Dayanita Singh offered her sitters the option to take their portraits home with them. The majority of the friends and family depicted in the series ‘The Ladies of Calcutta’ chose to do so. Those images remain on the walls of Singh’s subjects, in homes around Calcutta that they will have returned to during India’s extensive lockdown.
Sarah Jones, ‘The Sitting Room, (Francis Place), III’, (1997)
‘The Sitting Room (Francis Place) III’ is part of a project that Sarah Jones undertook with three teenage girls, all friends that the artist knew well. The photographs situate the girls within the communal living spaces of their own family homes. The affluent comfort of the setting is undercut by the air of constraint that the girls’ body language suggests.
Toyin Ojih Odutola, ‘Gap Year,’ (2017)
Ojih Odutola’s paintings often pinpoint the casual repose of their subjects as they lean against a wall, study a book or look out the window with a cup of coffee. ‘Gap Year’ departs from this nonchalance as the hunched posture of the pajama clad figure suggests the throes of an existential crisis.
The figure cannot see the turning tide in the background, trapped as they are on the veranda furniture between the inside and the outside of their home. Rather than the expanse of time and space that a ‘gap year’ implies, the narrowness of the figure’s life is made clear from the skewed angle of the composition.
Alejandra Hernández, ‘Lizard Queen’, (2016)
Illustrating moments of daydreaming or waiting, Colombian artist Alejandra Hernández brings together the ‘inner-spiritual’ and the ‘outer-physical’ worlds of her subjects.This painting is from her ‘Female ecosystems’ series which features women, individually or in groups, within intensely personal worlds. Viewed within her bathroom, ‘Lizard Queen’ is poised at a moment of reinvention with recently cut hair on her shoulders and the floor.
Jordan Casteel, ‘Ato’, (2014)
Having described herself as ‘hyper-aware’ of her surroundings, Jordan Casteel’s figurative paintings betray an equal interest in the setting as well as the sitter. Casteel creates large-scale portraits of black males who are known to her from the communities where she has lived.
This vibrant portrait of ‘Ato’ appears to blend an intimate vulnerability with a subtle unease. It differs from the majority of Casteel’s portraits which tend to feature male friendship, showing her subjects in pairs or small groups on living room furniture.