Bobby Morebed

Snow Gallery is pleased to present new paintings by Bobby Morebed, his first solo gallery show.

Morebed works in a lineage of American transgression running from John Waters to Mike Kelley: bad taste as method, abjection as structure. But where Waters narrates, Morebed reduces. His images strip down to emblem—figures held in a tense, confrontational stillness.

The paintings engage the legacy of 1990s figuration—John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik, Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, Lisa Yuskavage—while refusing their composure. Bodies are bound, exposed, exaggerated, grotesque: “nasty pretty.” The handling is blunt, even distressing—part confession, part formal compulsion. Figures never settle; they oscillate between submission and performance.

A central motif is the staging of plus-size bodies in scenarios of constraint and theatrical bondage. These figures are neither idealized nor neutral. They insist. Morebed’s own language—affectionate, crude, deliberately “incorrect”—tracks the work’s volatility. The question is not whether it offends, but what kind of attachment it reveals: fixation, projection, desire that resists cleanup.

Structurally, Mike Kelley is the closer analogue. The body appears as a site of damage and psychic residue. There are echoes of RE/Search Publications—its catalog of taboo and subculture—but Morebed is not archival. The paintings fixate rather than document.

A punk logic governs the work: compression, distortion, refusal of finish. Bad language and nasty figuration are not effects but tools. The paintings reject the pieties of good taste and correct speech, yet retain a thread of tenderness. However abjected, these bodies are held in view.

Morebed also occupies a difficult proximity to contemporary queer figuration. Alongside Doron Langberg and Lou Fratino, he shares a commitment to desire as structure. But where those painters pursue lyricism, Morebed pushes toward something harsher, more unstable—an unruly field of queer affect that resists refinement.

—David Rimanelli