Sotheby’s has chosen the theme of the naked human body for a new exhibition.It is an obvious leitmotif for a selling show of name artists, when so many have worked with nude figurature throughout history.“The Nude in the XX and XXI,” as the name implies, features mainly contemporary work. The exhibition features pieces by 31 artists, including Egon Schiele and Lucian Freud, as well as Louise Bourgeois, Marina Abramović, and Tracy Emin, whose intimate explorations of the female body challenge centuries of objectification of women by men in art.Recent and specially commissioned works featured respond to our complex relationship with the naked body in today’s culture. These include British portrait artist Jonathan Yeo’s study of the impact of plastic surgery; new work by the German artist Martin Eder, who looks to the generation “who grew up with Internet porn and have a completely different relationship with the nude”; and paintings by Caroline Walker. She asks “what is it to be a woman and be looked at by men?”All are finding fresh angles on the nude form, which has been in art from prehistoric times, transforming into the heroic, muscular male forms of Antiquity and the reclining odalisques of 19th-Century painting. The body in the raw remains dominant in western art even as attitudes change.The show is curated by an independent curator and writer, Jane Neal, who co-authored “Cities of the Future: 21-Century Avant Gardes” and curated “Nightfall: New Tendencies in Figurative Painting” for MODEM Centre for Contemporary Arts in Hungary, and which travelled to the Rudolfinum in Prague in 2013.The S|2 gallery, with spaces in New York and London, has organized pop-up exhibitions and also facilitates bespoke private acquisitions and sales.Artist list: Marina Abramović, Zsolt Bodoni, Armin Boehm, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Paul Cézanne, Mircea Cantor, Tamara de Lempicka, Marlene Dumas, Martin Eder, Tracey Emin, Lucian Freud, Robert Fry, Alberto Giacometti, Antony Gormley, Stéphane Graff, Gustav Klimt, Justin Mortimer, Edvard Munch, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Pablo Picasso, Dione Roach, Egon Schiele, Dennis Scholl, Attila Szucs, Alexander Tinei, Kees van Dongen, Caroline Walker, Tom Wesselmann, Hugo Wilson and Jonathan Yeo.“The Nude in the XX and XXI Century,” curated by Jane Neal, is at Sotheby’s S|2 London, 31 St George Street, Mayfair, from November 19 2015 through January 15, 2016. Information: http://www.sothebys.com/S2
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