Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to present Ad Libidinum, London-based artist George Wilkin's first solo exhibition at the gallery. Painting on linen over a luminous umber base, Wilkin draws from a wide range of sources: vintage erotica, contemporary fashion magazines, merchandising, and music videos. Her motifs are superimposed, each painting acting as a visual portmanteau of desire and power. Oftentimes three or four distinct images are overlaid to compound their narrative qualities: dialogues slipping in and out in a Rorschach-like test of the viewer's own subliminal desires.
In Ad Libidinum, fashion and clothing are primary subjects, acting as symbols of eroticism, and public and private expression, as well as that of repression or constriction. The artist considers how clothes express an individual's identity, uniform-like as they conceal or contain. Throughout the exhibition, leather buckled harnesses and cotton ties exist as dual symbols of self-expression and constraint. Haberdasher (2026) presents an eruption of ribbons and fastenings, with underlayers shining through like sun beams in a dark attic. For Wilkin, clothing can be bondage, or it can be generative and shapeshifting, as it offers the figure a new material form.
A core reference for the artist is James Joyce's 1939 experimental novel Finnegans Wake, in particular his nonlinear narration and radical reworking of language. In Joyce's hands words are spliced and combined in an allusive and delirious manner. Through her own visual layering, Wilkin likewise encourages a decomposition between the signifier and the signified. She creates a sultry world in which tangible motifs like gripped hands, harnesses, ties or belts dissolve into visual pattern expressed with loose brush strokes. Bend of Bay (2026) takes its title from the first line of Finnegans Wake: 'from swerve of shore to bend of bay'. Here Wilkin interprets a sequence of stills from Italian director Paolo Sorrentino's films alongside the serpentine outlines of two women reclining, a singular orange held between their open mouths.
Wilkin's exhibition title, Ad Libidinum is a Joycean play on words, riffing on the Latin phrase 'Ad libitum', meaning 'as you desire', from which we derive Ad-lib, to create or perform without prior preparation. In essence, Wilkin's paintings are libidinal and instinctive. Her process is intuitive, the first layer of imagery informing the next only upon completion, with no pre-determined order or number of layers, nor set final composition. In Garden of Idem (2026) four distinct sets of imagery are interwoven, some continuous across the triptych, others as repeated units - three pairs of women's shoes, three sets of a horse's hind legs. Across the exhibition, Wilkin plays with these polyptych presentations, interested in film animation and Eadweard Muybridge's animal studies, where narrative unfolds between small shifts in repeated movement.
Carnal and sinuous, Wilkin's paintings are concerned with the tensions between public and private expression, restraint and control, and desire within traditional hierarchies of status and power. Through layering and doubling, meaning hands itself over to sensation in the warmth of a half-awakened mind, with moments of clarity that spring from the haze.
George Wilkin (b. 1990, London) lives and works in London. She received a BA in Sculpture from Camberwell College of Arts (2019). Between November 2025 and November 2026, Wilkin was in residence at Sarabande Foundation, London. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Parasocial, Subtitle Labs, London (2026); PAIRINGS | Glenn Brown + George Wilkin, Benjamin Parsons Gallery, Oxford (2020); and Intuit, Freud Museum, London (2018).