George Rouy

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 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paintings, turns toward the immaterial––the spectral, the atmospheric and the elusive where anatomy is suggested, then withdrawn.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.

George Rouy (b. 1994, Sittingbourne, Kent, United Kingdom. Lives and works in Faversham, United Kingdom) Rouy’s work is held in museum collections including Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, France; The Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, France; Stahl Collection, Norrkoping, Sweden; SFMoMA, San Francisco CA; LACMA, Los Angeles CA; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix AZ; Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley CA; M Woods, Beijing, China; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China. Recent projects have included Presence in Form, Conciliazione 5, Rome, Italy (2026); Shadowing, Château de Boisgeloup, Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, Gisors, France (2025); Bodysuit, a 45-minute live performance created with choreographer Sharon Eyal, London, United Kingdom and Los Angeles CA (2023-2025) and The Witness, made in response to The Massacre at Chios by Eugène Delacroix, an invitation from the Musée du Louvre and Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (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.