Luella Bartley: Passenger

Bodies leap, twist and bound through space, their movements simultaneously awkward and graceful, fragile and athletic. Passenger, Luella Bartley’s solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin presents a new body of work that evolved through the artist sitting in on dance rehearsals led by the acclaimed director and choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor. The resulting works explore the fine balance between effort and elegance that Bartley observed in the dance studio while also marking an important shift in her own practice. While her previous paintings negotiated complex feelings of vulnerability and exposure, with a particular focus on women’s bodies, these works capture a powerful kind of physicality that is not just androgynous, but expansive, fluid and fluctuating. 

 

Watching the rehearsals, Bartley found herself as captivated by the beauty and fluidity of the dancer’s movements as by the strength, intensity and stamina that was required of their bodies. ‘To me, this idea of fragility and power, the effort that goes into creating something that appears so seamless seemed like a metaphor for the clash between how we deal with things internally and how we appear externally, how we can contain and experience all these different, seemingly opposite feelings in one single moment,’ she says. She took photographs and made sketches in the dance studio and then returned to her own studio to work further into the images before drawing directly on to the canvas with coloured crayon pencils, creating hard definite lines that appear in contrast to watery, translucent layers of paint. This visual juxtaposition is perhaps most obvious in the painting in which the dancer appears crouched on their heels with their palms pressed into the floor in front of them. Although the painting is cropped at the shoulders, we get the sense that the dancer is not so much at rest, as poised, ready and waiting for whatever comes next: the soft folds of their white t-shirt, track pants and socks simultaneously concealing and revealing the tension of their body. 

 

While Bartley worked as a fashion designer for many years before beginning painting, this is the first time that her figures have appeared clothed. ‘As a designer I always thought about narratives, whereas this is very much about the feeling and sensuality of clothes,’ she says. She painted the clothes in which the dancers naturally appeared, fascinated by how the fabric moved with and against their bodies, how it gathered, creased and clung to their sweat. In the paintings, the clothing captures a sense of movement, space and time. We see in the dirty stained soles of the dancers’ white socks, the movement that has come before, the points where their flesh has pressed into the ground. 

 

Bartley was also struck by the neutrality of the body within the rehearsal space, how it became less about individual identity and more about the collective, less about sexuality or gender and more about movement and energy. This fluidity is reflected in the physicality of Bartley’s figures – in the fragile luminosity of their skin and their bulging, exaggerated muscles – and in the contrast between strength and tenderness. In one work, a single figure appears three times, like a long-exposure photograph, tumbling through space. Their limbs are seemingly tangled and knocking into one another but within that fraught, wrestling movement, there are also moments of release and caress: an arched back, a palm cradling a foot, the side of a hand grazing a leg. The idea of being carried, pushed and pulled by an abstract force, is also evoked by the exhibition’s title, a reference to the song of the same name by Iggy Pop, but it is also about a journey: letting go and in this case, trusting in the movement and physicality of our bodies. 
 

The anonymity of Bartley’s figures allows us to embody the movements she paints, to feel the stretch and contraction of the muscles, the power and the energy. These are works that find beauty in struggle and complexity, that push against any kind of social expectation that disallows playfulness and experimentation.