Utställning SPA, Harry Woodrow
Harry Woodrow
Spa
5 November 2024 – 11 January 2025
Riche, Stora Matsalen
Birger Jarlsgatan 4, 114 34 Stockholm
Harry Woodrow is an artist and designer, was born in 1974 in London, studied at Central Saint Martins and now lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden, since 2015. In april 2023, Harry was part of the group exhibition, FAKE LOCATION SUSPECTED, at Riche, curated by Ashik Zaman. In 2024 Harry was part of the Vårsalongen at Liljevachs. At Riche he presents Spa, a series of works depicting jacuzzis.
What is the SPA?
– SPA is the combination and prolongation of Here Come the Warm Jets and 1-Hour Jacuzzi.
So, how come the urge of painting this series?
– At first, I didn’t know what I was looking at. I was scrolling through Blocket, looking for second hand garden furniture, and every so often these strange images would appear — were they spacecraft? Prosthetic medical devices? Advanced agricultural machinery? I looked closer, clicked through to read more, and found I was looking at jacuzzis, or spa baths. I started taking screenshots and collecting the images, and they soon became a recurring motif in my work.
Their weirdness fascinates me, their eroticised, sinister hybrid of organic and technological, feminine and masculine — breast and buttock-like moulded shapes, studded and penetrated by shiny metallic nozzles, primed to spurt forth jets of frothy liquid. For objects so focussed on comfort and pleasure, they are quite frightening looking things, evoking Cronenberg’s body horror and the nightmarish post-human hybrids of HR Giger; and like JG Ballard’s slow motion car crashes they simultaneously titillate and repel.
But in reality the glossy sci-fi surfaces are misleading. It’s not intergalactic space travel that they promise, but something much earthier — the tawdry sex, champagne and hot tub selfies of bourgeois suburbia. As they multiply over villa decks like a virus, they become symbols of northern Europe’s rightward (and inward) drift, from utopian social democracy into narcissistic neoliberalism.
For more info about Harry Woodrow.
https://www.harrywoodrow.com/
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