Coates & Scarry are currently showing a new body of works ‘The Unversed” by Lisa Wright.

The exhibition features a series of drawings, paper studies and paintings exploring the theme of emotional and physical vulnerability during puberty.  Interweaving motifs and ideas from historical paintings with contemporary concerns, Lisa Wright’s work moves between and through different times.

Often isolated, the figures within Wright’s paintings and drawings hover on the brink of adulthood. With puberty, emotions are intensified, the insignificant is magnified and the importance of the presentation of the self, of body image, predominates. Many of the figures are unclothed and adorned with fragment of formal adult, decorative clothing – ribbons, ruffs and petticoats.

They wear simple black or white masks, reminiscent of Venetian carnival masks, emphasising the search for identity and construction of the self. Likewise, the title of the exhibition, ‘The Unversed’, alludes to the figures lacking the language, skills and experience to express themselves or to describe their experiences adequately. Instead, emotions and ideas are untold: lives remaining in a state of anticipation and a state of potential.

View the full set from the opening here

Lisa Wright – The Unversed
Coates & Scarry
Until 17 October
8 Duke Street
London SW1Y 6BN