Meet George Rouy, the 30-Year-Old British Painter With a Knack for Making Things ‘Bleed’
George Rouy is lounging on his bed at home, a former church in Faversham, England. He’s surrounded by stained-glass windows, which obscure any views of the old brewery town that sits about 50 miles outside London, adding to an eerie sense of isolation. It’s a feeling that Rouy, who lives alone and paints by himself every day in his studio down the road, knows well.
“It can be quite a lonely experience,” he explains, describing it as a “heaviness.” “I think that’s probably the hardest thing about being an artist sometimes.” Intensifying the solitude is the fact that he appears to be accompanied by a multitude of others: the figures who melt into one another in his turbulently expressive canvases. They’re just not very good conversationalists.
More from Robb Report
“It feels like this kind of strange madness sometimes.”
But Rouy (pronounced ROO-ie) is pushing through, completing the paintings for “The Bleed,” the two-part exhibition that will mark his solo debut with Hauser & Wirth. At 30, he is the youngest artist on the mega gallery’s roster (he also continues to be represented by Hannah Barry Gallery in London).
Amid the riot of flesh tones in his latest works—half of which will be shown in London in October and half in Los Angeles in February to coincide with the Frieze art fair—there is often the suggestion of a body being carried by several others. Rouy lists his many references: Christ, collective care, a baby, and a funeral procession, in addition to the more esoteric idea of weightlessness. “It’s about human essence in its entirety,” he says.
Rouy grew up in the nearby town of Sittingbourne, where he felt a natural kinship with the arts from the start, if not with academics. “It’s always been my language,” he says. “I’ve always felt very at peace and calm in an art studio.” Perhaps there was something in the water—or in his parents’ encouragement: Both his younger brother and sister became artists as well.
Rouy connected with figuration in particular but abandoned it in art school, where it was not in vogue. “I kind of dismantled everything,” he recalls, “and then after I left uni, I fell back in love with painting.” Over a period of two or three years, he rebuilt his practice, developing the mature style that has fast earned him attention on both sides of the Atlantic.
His process begins much the way many millennials and Gen Zers spend their downtime: scanning the digital universe for compelling images. Rouy photoshops them into a collage, but he doesn’t paint the collage per se. It’s more of a jumping-off point. His first round of painting, using acrylics, is relatively literal; subsequent layers get increasingly abstract, blurring the forms together in a manner that suggests motion but also chaos and angst. “There is something existential about the work,” he says.
Toward the end, he turns to oils. “The oil becomes that finishing layer, the kind of extra, because there’s such a beautiful weight and density to oil that acrylic doesn’t have,” he explains.
His wet-on-wet method imparts a glow to the canvases. That effect, which seems to allude to a screen, coupled with his reliance on Instagram and Google, may bring to mind digital culture, but Rouy says that’s to be expected in the 2020s: “They can’t help but be influenced by technology. But that doesn’t mean they’re about the technology.”
With his cropped, bright blond hair and lean frame, Rouy has the look of a punk rocker, and it turns out he long found another creative outlet singing and playing bass guitar for punk bands. But he never much liked being in a group. “To be honest, it drove me mad collaborating with people,” he admits. “You get so used to being in the studio on your own and being a master of your own creations all the time. As soon as other people are involved, you want to be a control freak.”
After being wowed by the avant-garde choreography of Sharon Eyal, though, he rethought his reticence. Her dances have helped shape his ideas about figuration and movement, and the pair have now teamed up to create two performance pieces, the latest of which he expects to be shown in the U.S. and Europe in 2025. His paintings, which will appear to be doubled with the aid of a mirrored floor, form the set, but he also composed the music, which incorporates both a cello and a synthesizer. He even found himself joining in with the dancers for their morning warm-ups—and enjoying it.
“It felt sad when I had to leave,” Rouy says. “But yeah, back to my lonely studio.”
Best of Robb Report
Sign up for RobbReports's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
