Grove Collective is pleased to present the upcoming group exhibition Fragmented Intimacy, featuring the UK-based artists Amy Beager and C. Lucy R. Whitehead, on view online in virtual reality through the Grove Collective website. This is the first time these artists have shown together, and marks the first time Grove Collective has worked with either of these artists. While both of these artists’ practices vary greatly in their final iterations – C. Lucy R. Whitehead’s work largely trades in a frenetic abstraction, while Amy Beager’s artwork often luxuriates on classical forms – the themes that undergird much of their collective work bear much in common. The fragmentation of the bodily form, and the intimacies within which the body is necessarily interpolated, sits at the core of both artists’ output. The figural annihilation of abstraction in Whitehead’s work is paired with the magnification (or amputation) of body parts in Beager’s, but still more lingers: the emotional disjuncture present in many of Beager’s intimate scenes proves reminiscent of the uncertainty born out of Whitehead’s whirling lines or concentrated geometries. Likewise, the body – its limitations, realities, and wonders – has consistently been an area of focus for co-curators Jacob Barnes and Morgane Wagner. A commonality to us all, the human body presents endless points for communal interrogation and reflection; its concerns remain, as always, our great equalizer. Yet, beyond a simple interest in the corporeal, this exhibition confronts a topic much more timely: as the public collectively continues to grapple with the pathologization of the body itself, Barnes and Wagner look to probe intimacy’s place in collective constriction. While much is made of an inability to live out otherwise normal social lives, Fragmented Intimacy draws to mind questions concerning constricted intimacy: does the discord presented here presage what is to soon to come, or instead act a reminder of what we will all soon consciously avoid?
