Tschabalala Self: Home Body

Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Home Body, an exhibition of new paintings, drawings, sculptures and functional art objects by Tschabalala Self. 

Working as windows into the home, groupings of intimate vignettes across both gallery spaces situate Self’s chorus of imagined characters within domestic scenes. A colloquial term for an introvert who prefers to stay within the confines of home, the show’s title Home Body underscores the inherent tensions at work in domestic settings, where socially-prescribed identity and gender politics still furnish our so-called ‘safe spaces’. 

Depicting moments of intimacy, a new series of paintings, on view at Eastcastle Street, have been constructed as assemblages, combining various modes of expression such as sewn, painted and printed materials. The exhibition introduces Self’s functional art objects, tables and chairs, to London, a recent development in the artist’s practice. These geometric props of quotidian items heighten the theatricality found within her two-dimensional works. 

At Savile Row, the sculptures and paintings on display focus on the motif of the seated figure, a connection to Seated (2022), Self’s first public sculpture that has been commissioned by Avant Arte. A further interrogation into what separates the public from the private, the works introduce new iterations of the archetypal characters depicted in Sounding Board. Two life-sized bronze figures – a material synonymous with monuments of the important and mighty – sit on chairs, becoming part of the furniture. Surrounded by large-scale paintings on paper and canvas, the abstracted figures form props for Self’s stage, where the home and the body can only be one. 

In conversation: Tschabalala Self and Ekow Eshun
Saturday 15 October 2022, 12pm
Pilar Corrias Eastcastle Street

Tschabalala Self will be in conversation with Ekow Eshun, writer and curator of In the Black Fantastic, recently on view at Hayward Gallery, London.