WHAT I'M DOING WITH MY BODY by Beatrix Haxby

About

Haxby's pieces are like cosmic vaults, overstimulated and thoroughly composed, infused with a bizarre depth of intimacy. Acutely aware of her times, Haxby’s practice seeks to trouble and transform conceived notions of gender, the muse, and aesthetics. She is eager to revise the cultural script of the ‘tortured artiste’ crying into their cigarette. Behold - strength, power, precision. Beatrix sculpts her physical form through intensive calisthenics, a process she describes as ‘body architecture’. A statue disguised as a human being, her hair is a storm of crows and her waist is belt of Adonis.

Surrealist dismemberment of women serves unexpected ends of queer camouflage. Like Emin, Haxby is willing to indulge in some of our contemporary prurience, however she keeps us at arms length with her abstraction - troubled by the extent to which lesbian women are often damagingly superseded by their pornographic simulacrum.

Haxby’s sexual mutiny sees her role-play as puppet and puppeteer, showoff and voyeur, through cinematic portrayals of imagined fantasy scenes. An artist with ‘too many emotions to know what to do with’, she has described her paintings as channeling an ‘almost earnest eroticism’ that aims to explore universal truths of loss, unrequited love, and loneliness. The obstreperous joy of excess, her noise is everywhere. She is alchemising pain in slow motion and hyperspeed.

Dalí and Emin thought experiments aside, Haxby is the real-life daughter of New Romantics lumianary Phylllis Cohen, the master behind the Pink Floyd back catalogue. Haxby will be painted by her mother and execute a live bar dance to music by Gnasha, a Leeds based dubstep producer.

“Beatrix’s bar work blends street calisthenics with rhythm, proving she possesses an amazing level of body control.”

- Andrea Stockburn, European Breakdance Champion

“A multiplicity of subjects and figures inhabit Haxby’s imagination and live in her artworks, whose surrealist framework favours an impactful communication of underlying messages.”

- Peter Gagliardi, London Art Biennale

OPENING NIGHT: 20th of October, 6 - 10pm

CLOSING NIGHT & LIVE PERFORMANCE: 6 - 10pm, live performance at 8pm.

The show will run for 5 days, until the 25th of October. The exhibition will be open from 11am - 5pm.