Lot 2 - Elsa Rouy - Nosebleed #2

ARTIST INFO

About 

London based artist Elsa Rouy (Sittingbourne, Kent) creates art with a female gaze. Elsa explores new ways of expressing semi-autobiographical and social narratives following a discourse related to the human condition. She has an interest in female sexual expression and the imperfect-self. Her artworks satirize immoral thoughts that are terrifying, centring around feelings of shame and guilt. To explore this, Elsa paints hedonistic grotesque figures often of monstrous women with their sexual organs revealed. To imitate her hyperawareness of having a body she subverts and delocalizes depictions of female and male genitalia to form androgenous or fluid figures that resonate to the artist’s identity while also removing a fixed identity. Elsa’s practice underlines the parts of ourselves that we find uncomfortable, accentuated by ardent depictions of bodily fluids; such as blood, pus, semen, faeces, milk, urine, sweat and saliva. There is a link between bodily fluids and the notion of being a human and our mortality. The leaking of bodily fluids breaks the containment associated with correctness and purity, which are constantly strived for in our society, our bodies and our minds. The bodily fluids are presented to expose the unsavoury parts of being human that are considered taboo. Her artwork explores societal and internal power roles. Elsa appropriates the human body to discuss relationships between people and the self that are saturated with child-like dependency, intrusion and boundaries. Alongside a distortion of interior and exterior bodies, the artworks denote emotional illusion, trust and trepidation between people. The figures often have connections to expulsion and birth that act simultaneously as a harbouring or a needed release of these emotional burdens.  

Education 

2018-2021 Camberwell College of the Arts (UAL) BA First Class Hons Painting 

Select Exhibitions/Awards 

Solo Exhibitions 2024 Upcoming Guts Gallery 2023 Upcoming, Steve Turner Gallery, USA 2022 I Could Always Crack a Joke, Guts Gallery London 2021 A Demon in a Sundress, Guts Gallery, London 2020 Plastic Doesn’t Sweat, Guts Gallery, London 2020 Platform, Unit London, London Art Fairs 2023 Steve Turner, Miami, USA 2023 Steve Turner, Future Fair, New York, USA 2023 Wrinkles in My Sheets, Ye Collective, Hybrid Art Fair, Madrid, Spain Group Exhibitions 2023 Saints and Sinners, Guts Gallery, London, UK 2023 Elsa Rouy & Emil Urbanek, EIGEN + ART Lab, Berlin, Germany 2023 The Artist is Present, Guts Gallery, London 2023 (It's My Party) I Can Cry if I Want to, Guts Gallery, London 2022 Human In Training, Tuesday to Friday, Valencia 2022 There Goes the Neighbourhood, Castor Gallery, London 2022 ‘…and kneeling at the edge of the transparent sea I shall shape for myself a new heart from salt and mud.’, Kupfer Projects, London 2022 Out of Nowhere, Soho Revue, London 2022 Two Sisters, Roman Road Gallery, London 2022 Damned If I Do, Gallery 46 Whitechapel, London 2022 CACOTOPIA, Annka Kultys, London  

Gallery Representation 

Guts Gallery (Championed not represented) 

Statement about AOAP Submitted Artwork 

The four works are charcoal and oil on paper. They look at the act of kissing and thematic suggestion through colour. The red oil paint suggestive of blood or lipstick or food against the black and white image. The two artworks of close-up mouths were formed using mark making and filling in gaps with block colour to form the image rather than having a distinctive line. This abstracts the image and, like the suggestion of colour, only signifies the act of kissing rather than an outright depiction. They are smaller works that have become the catalyst for a small series of paintings by the artist. 

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