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.’