The Nakeds at De La Warr Pavilion

The Nakeds is a group exhibition that looks at drawings of the body exposed.  The practice of drawing a naked body, either from the self, life model, reproduction or imagination, has provided the artist with the freedom to explore the inner self.  The drawings in this exhibition are not necessarily physically realistic yet the sense of mental and psychological anguish that they evoke is real enough.   Some of the bodily distortions are  at odds with the images of perfect bodies that abound in our physical and online environment.

The Nakeds takes as its starting point selected drawings of the single figure by Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918). Working at the same time as Sigmund Freud, in the birthplace of modern psychiatry, the artist was attacked and acclaimed in his short lifetime. Still dividing opinion today, his drawings tested long-held distinctions between the ‘nude’ and the ‘naked’, art and pornography. The exhibition seeks to explore this contested terrain and considers work by artists from the post-war period to the present day including new work made specifically for The Nakeds by Enrico David, Stewart Helm, Chantal Joffe and Nicola Tyson.

– The Nakeds has been curated by Drawing Room directors Mary Doyle and Kate Macfarlane in collaboration with artist David Austen and art historian Gemma Blackshaw.

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