Drawing Room Study 4

'I’m fascinated,' says the British painter Robert Fry, 'by the spectrum of paint as a medium, its vastness and complexity.' Drawing Room Study 4, a large-scale work in oil, acrylic and marker pen, is an arresting enactment of this fascination. On the upper half of the canvas, Fry depicts a seated nude, using fleshy pink and white tones for the body whilst concealing the face behind a smudge of black paint. Below, Fry has placed its mirror image, a nightmarish alternative being that seems unable to maintain the fixity of its form. Both sit above a vivid purple background, whose calmness seems to bely the violence of the figure’s transformations. Fry’s expressive brushstrokes, themselves brutal and unsettling, suggest a figure in emotional conflict with itself. ‘The possibilities of painting as a practice,' says Fry, 'made me restless and uneasy, and this propelled me forward.' Drawing Room Study 4 appeared in the Saatchi Gallery’s 2010 show Newspeak: British Art Now, in London and at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The same year Fry was shortlisted for the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize, and in 2013 he featured in the Thames & Hudson publication 100 Painters of Tomorrow.