The Decay of Beauty. The Beauty of Decay. | Colnaghi
This is a seasonally appropriate exhibition, at a time when the kerbsides of Mayfair are carpeted with the mulch of fallen leaves. It was misty in London the week I went to Conaghi; the clocks went back a few days later.
The works in this show ranged vastly from an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus face to a luminous 2002 memento mori portrait from Maria Lassnig. In between, there’s a number of paintings informed by the Christian tradition of vanitas: still lives and skulls, there to remind viewers, then and now, of the transience of earthly goods - earthly beauty.
Harry’s Nipple, by the American realist painter Catherine Murphy and pictured below, makes the same point really. Of course it does - why else would it be included in the exhibition? But it makes it in a cheeky and memorable way. Executed in 2003, I think it’s the most recent work in the show.
Catherine Murphy ‘Harry’s Nipple’ (2003)
A slightly pendulous male breast looms out at us, glowingly, from a peekaboo circular tear in a T-shirt. A corona of little white bumps surround the nipple. And there’s some stringy hairs too, some of them grey. A more flattering portrait would have excised both these imperfections, leaving us only with the round, delicate pinkness that forms the painting’s focus.
Murphy - and the other artists in this exhibition - aren’t interested in that. They want to expose the inevitable going-wrongness of our humanity. And that we might find it cheeky, repulsive or even sexy while it’s going wrong.
The Decay of Beauty. The Beauty of Decay. is at Colnaghi (London). 09 October - 08 November 2024