As well as describing a quality of sexual attractiveness or lasciviousness, the word "sexy", in current usage, is an adjective that approves something as good, esteemed, or groovy. So SEXY, the show, as well as being concerned with sexual characteristics and feelings and the excitement of desire, also gives itself a remit to do whatever it wants, as long as it thinks it's good even if it's not about sex. You'll find in practice, though, that the show SEXY gives you two SEXYS for the price of one: that SEXY is pretty much about SEX, and is pretty damn SEXY.
The show's contributors represent a wide breadth of interest and practice, and will include these artists:
Daniel Chadwick makes superlatively engineered, libidinously kinetic machines. Two works are being shown at SEXY: a languidly beautiful mobile, and a sumptuous black velvet vitrine in which hairlike fronds respond to an engorging tumulesence under ultra-violet light.
Emma Cox is a late and very welcome addition to SEXY. She is a video and performance artist graduating from her fine art degree at Middlesex University this year. Using a tiny surveillance camera placed so as to look out from within the most definingly female part of her anatomy, Cox reverses the gaze and offers a new and different perspective on the female, presented with sophisticated wit and humour.
David Falconer's meticulously crafted phalanx of dead mice, first shown at Jake and Dinos Chapman's gallery, and later acquired for the Saatchi Collection, was a wake up call for complacent Mickymouseism in fine art. For SEXY Falconer is showing work that offers a complete contrast to his sculptural work; a intensely sweet painting made using a tie-dye process, and which is scented with Patchouli oil.
Huger Foote's last one person show, at Hamilton's, was extremely successful. For SEXY Foote will be showing a photographic work in which he salvages an unexpected drama and beauty from his depiction of female feet striding through otherwise prosaic garbage. This work, like Foote's other images of ordinary things are unexpectedly ravishing, being finely poised studies of line and colour made to a punishingly high standard. Foote's new book Huger Foote: My Friend from Memphis will be published by Booth-Clibborn later this year.
Bella Freud In the 10 years since Bella Freud founded her fashion label, her immaculately crafted tailoring and subtle but definite silhouette has become her signature style. She is a tongue in cheek, intellectual designer, whose idiosyncratic English attitude has been influenced by enigmatic style queens of the European tradition. Freud has made a work for SEXY that is a thrillingly erotic, fetish object for intelligent contemplation.
Oona Grimes is known for her accomplished, high-energy printmaking. For SEXY, however, Oona will show her first paintings. These are densely depicted tragi-comedies, often using comic forms a waking dream world of childhood, sexuality and ambiguous feeling.
Chantal Joffe is celebrated for her studies of demonstrative female sexuality, which are acutely observed, funny and deeply poignant. Joffe is represented in many collections, including the Saatchi.
Rut Blees Luxemburg's potent photographic explorations into the nocturnal city display a euphoric, empowered gratification. Her new book Liebeslied is published in September by Black Dog Publishing.
Goshka Macuga makes videos and constructions that are very low tech, but very high art. Macuga is showing two works for SEXY: a video in which a simple 3-D postcard is turned so as to create a monumental study of sexualised revealment, and a photo work in which usually discarded paper ephemera is used to construct a trustingly idealised vision of reflective wonder.
David Medalla, an international constant in the arts since the sixties, is showing a new work for SEXY that is a beautiful and sincere homo-erotic work, whose elegance transcends the humility of its construction. The text on the piece reads that Sailors are the Wings of Love.
James Moores is known for his cool and lucid studies of taxonomy. For SEXY a previously unseen work is presented. This is a richly coloured plane in which a duo-tone impasto has recorded, while the paint was wet, the literal act of coitus that took place on its surface between the artist and girlfriend. The work makes humorous reference to artistic happenings, yet exists on its own merits for its rich formal qualities.
Gerben Mulder's drawings of little girls are ambiguously repellent studies of childhood sexuality.
Hadrian Pigott is well known for his highly crafted eroticising of bathroom and consumer culture and, more recently, for a series of seductive photographs of roadscape imagery offering a welcome relief from urban gridlock. Pigott's work shown for SEXY is a photographic study the artist has made of a detail of one of his sculptural works.
Hugo Rittson's inclusion in recent show Goldsex included his delightful video on sexual bestiality. The show ended in violence and a piece in the Sunday Sport. Rittson has made a new piece for SEXY, in which he subverts pornographic film making. Rittson's work, taken from an old porn film, shows a couple copulating but where the original male porn star's expressive head has been replaced (using digital technology) with that of the impassive artist's.
Padraig Timoney is another late but very welcome addition to the show. Timoney is known as a thoughtful artist, whose work is eclectic and which repays closer attention. For SEXY Timoney has made reference to several works by Poussin, depicting Nymphs and Satyrs, the paint layers overlaid on each other, then subjected to a chemical attack. This simultaneously reveals yet disallows the visual reading of the painting. A sensual and suggestive work is made by this process, that is rich in dissolute colour and contour.
Max Wigram is an artist and curator, known for previous work on that icon of suave male sexuality, James Bond. For SEXY Wigram is showing an edited section from a longer work, in which urbanely sexualised masculinity is depicted as obstructed by the prosaic reality of everyday disappointment. Wigram is currently co-curating Apocalypse for the Royal Academy with Norman Rosenthal, as well as Sex and the British in Paris
SEXY is curated by Neal Brown, who writes about art for frieze magazine The Independent on Sunday, Art Monthly, Art and Text, Flash Art, Untitled and other publications. He is a co-author of Tracey Emin, pub Jay Jopling 1998. He curated Temple of Diana at the Blue Gallery in 1999, and curated ATOXIA, co-presented with Will Self in 1995. He is currently Director of the Fringe of the London Biennial.
