Lana Locke: I never could drink like Francis Bacon | Private view

About

For her first painting exhibition, I never could drink like Francis Bacon, Lana Locke creates visceral landscapes of indulgence, illness and bodily trauma. Paint is smeared, dripped and spat over heavy jute to perform as biological fluids.

Locke draws on autobiographical content to probe gendered notions of success and failure. I never could drink like Francis Bacon (2018) and Free drinks in Soho (2018-19) make dark comedy out of her desire and inability to keep pace with (male) artistic and alcoholic legacy, which is physically rejected.

Meanwhile she exposes a similar violence and vulnerability in the dark moments she shows here of childbirth in Afterbirth (2018) and motherhood in Mastitis Bath (2018-19). She then further rejects not only the aestheticised and contained female form but also the sanitisation of the domestic space.

Lana Locke is an artist working across a range of media. In her recent practice-based PhD on The Feral, the Art Object and the Social at Chelsea College of Arts, London, she created objects, installations and videos that crossed between the studio, the gallery and the street; and between social, material and feminist concerns.

Lana Locke (lives and works in London) has exhibited regularly in the UK, including twice in Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2013 and 2016, at the ICA London; Spike Island, Bristol and the Bluecoat, Liverpool); and in solo exhibitions at Liddicoat & Goldhill Project Space, Margate (2018), DOLPH Projects, (2016) and Schwartz Gallery (2014). She has also exhibited in group exhibitions at Kingston Museum (2019), with LUNGLEY Gallery at MOCA Taipei, Taiwan (2018), the Nunnery Gallery (2018), Block 336 (2015), APT Gallery (2013, 2015 and 2017) and the Royal Academy (2012).

More information can be found online at http://lungleygallery.com/