Luella Bartley: Intimate Spaces

A woman’s body appears bent, twisted and huddled in her nakedness. These portraits are anonymous, drawn from the neck down and detached from any external contexts, and yet, there is emotional depth in the woman’s physical gestures and the soft imperfections of her flesh. For Luella Bartley the rendering of the naked female form, through paint and at a large scale, is a deeply personal process of self-exploration. While she works with the same life model, the paintings emerge from a fluid and spontaneous process. ‘They’re not me but they feel like self-portraits,’ she says. For her first solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, titled Intimate Spaces, Bartley presents a new series of bold, ethereal paintings and illustrated monochromatic photographs that offer compelling and contradictory perspectives of the female body and self. Each work is an expression of beauty and revulsion, discomfort and brazenness, vulnerability and strength. 

 

Previously a fashion designer, the process of art making is relatively new to Bartley and this exhibition marks her first presentation of paintings. While in previous works, she outlined the shape of the female body in scratchy black lines to produce tense, quivering forms and bandaged sculptures, these paintings express a new-found sense of confidence as well as a tenderness towards her subject-matter. Take, for example, Held, which depicts a seated figure curled into itself: their legs are crossed, one hand is holding a foot while the other is wrapped around a thigh. It’s a posture that appears childlike, made somehow even more vulnerable by the oversized limbs and dark shadowy mass of pubic hair, but it can also be read as a pose of self-protection and preservation: the body is literally holding itself. ‘For me, the work is very much about finding a way of feeling okay with vulnerability and accepting that that kind of openness can actually be very powerful and transformative,’ says Bartley. 

 

The paintings still retain the hard lines of her previous drawings as well as the exaggerated physicality, which, along with the larger-than-life scale, makes it seem as if the body is very close up and expanding in space. However, as these works make clear, the body is not only movement and space, but also emotion and soft flesh, bulging and creased, painted in delicate shades of peach, pink and white with a slight shimmer to the surface and smudges of dirt on the soles of the feet. The paintings Laying and Lever, in particular, seem to not only lay bare the body’s rawness and imperfections, but to also celebrate those qualities. ‘The more paintings I’ve made the more I’ve felt this freedom around the power of female physicality which I think is also something that comes with age,’ explains Bartley. ‘As I get older, I’m coming to terms with owning the physicality of my own body.’

 

In all of the paintings the background details have been stripped away so that the body appears suspended within negative space, heightening the sense of exposure and forcing the gaze to view it on its own terms. This detailed study of form is further explored in a series of photographs onto which Bartley has drawn armature lines, transforming the woman’s body into a diagrammatic shape. In contrast to the paintings, these works appear stark and precise, making clear the relationship between artist and subject (the body here is a puppet to be moulded) and yet the drawn lines also emphasise the fragility of the body. In a way, Bartley’s exploration of the female body and experience hinges around these contradictions and seeks, through the process of making art, to find a way of accepting the tensions and letting go. As such, Intimate Spaces serves as an invitation as well as a confrontation: to approach the female body with empathy and without judgement.