Artist: Lawrence Perry

LBF Contemporary presents They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, an ambitious new body of work by London-based artist Lawrence Perry. A gifted figurative painter, Perry’s works in this series stage meticulously rendered depictions of his coterie of mostly young artists into mythological tableau vivants that manage to be at once extraordinarily realistic and yet remain strange and surreal. Drawing on a range of profound and coarse cultural sources, from the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan to the anarchic entertainment of Punch and Judy, and Virginia Woolf ’s time travelling Orlando to the Biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes, Perry has reimagined familiar and foundational cultural touchstones and transformed them from likeness.

While historically facing and fascinated by the ways in which universal fables can remain relevant in the most unlikely of circumstances, Perry’s paintings feel intensely contemporary: his incisive attention to the human form simultaneously adopts and ironises the saturation of constructed images in our age, where sexual desire and the threat of violence simmer below the surface. Formerly a fashion model and creative collaborator with Alessandro Micheles’ Gucci, Perry featured in highly aestheticised projects which, in their drama and palette, often married the opulence of the High Italian Renaissance with the excesses of 70s California. In the present exhibition, Perry has made works which successfully fuse disparate and uncanny worlds with sumptuous textures and shimmering surfaces.

Excitingly, the exhibition will also feature a major large-format group portrait, including depictions of his coterie of young artists and models. The eponymous painting, They Shoot Horses, Don't They, represents the moment of exhaustion and catharsis after dancing mania, the social phenomenon between the 14th and 17th centuries in which people danced erratically for hours or days, believed to be under a curse by a Catholic saint or under the influence of hallucinogenic bread. Or, closer to our time, how the dancing craze was adopted in the 1930s during the Great Depression and how the unemployed and destitute were forced to dance for their livelihoods in a humiliating spectacle. Ambitious, visceral, and at once historical and contemporary, this monumental work is the high-water mark of Perry’s singular aesthetic.

Lawrence Perry (b. 1999, Singapore) paints uncanny scenes loaded with a psychological charge and heavy dose of wit. The Singapore-born, London-based artist draws from film, mythology, literature and fashion to create scenes that feel familiar yet surreal, interacting with the emotional states of the figures that populate them. Each painting is packed with subtle nuance and contradiction, leading to an uneasy environment in which the viewer is invited to question the psychological states of his characters or the authenticity of their narrative. Since Graduating from The Slade School of Fine Art in 2021, he has gone on to have solo shows including "Merely A Dream” in Covent Garden and “After the Past” in Antwerp, amongst various other group shows in London and Belgium. Lawrence first came to the public eye in 2016 when his work as an in-house artist for an anti-Brexit lobbyist group was picked up by British GQ, and since featured in Alessandro Michele’s A/W 2020 campaign for Gucci, ‘Gucci, The Ritual.'