John Wesley

Waddington Galleries presents an exhibition of works on paper and paintings by John Wesley – the first survey of his work to be held in the United Kingdom. The exhibition consists of thirty works spanning from 1974 to 2004, twenty-five acrylics on paper and five on canvas.

For the last decade Wesley’s work has primarily focused on erotic imaginings of the female nude, resulting in images simultaneously “explicit and cryptic”. In the painting, ‘Girl with Cloth Rabbits’, 1998, for example, the monumental female figure’s eyes are covered by a white cloth rabbit, like a magician’s blindfold or white gloves, whilst a second cloth rabbit is balanced across her breasts; it is an intimate portrait of the senses, a hallucinatory fairy-tale of desire.