Motion in Stillness: Dance and the Human Body in Movement
About the exhibition
The challenge to preserve movement, even latent movement, in immobile form has preoccupied and beguiled artists over centuries. All of the artists presented in this exhibition have a relationship with dance or, more broadly speaking, with the human body in movement, and a number of artists, including Kylie Manning, France-Lise McGurn and Florence Peake, have created new works for this context.
Artists 09
Artists 09
Works 19
About the exhibition
Presented by
Victoria Miro & Vortic
Dates
21 Nov 2024 - 18 Jan 2025
María Berrío, Karon Davis, Rachel Kneebone, Kylie Manning, France-Lise McGurn, Florence Peake, Paula Rego, Megan Rooney, Xiyao Wang
The challenge to preserve movement, even latent movement, in immobile form has preoccupied and beguiled artists over centuries. All of the artists presented in this exhibition have a relationship with dance or, more broadly speaking, with the human body in movement, and a number of artists, including Kylie Manning, France-Lise McGurn and Florence Peake, have created new works for this context.
Dance is an art form in which the human body is the material, and the desire to embed the physical body into the artwork itself is a hallmark of many of the works in this exhibition. Megan Rooney wants us to feel the energy and experience of movement as much as she invites us to see it, so that brushwork becomes a kind of choreography. For a painter like Florence Peake, performance and the use of one’s own body are intrinsic to the process; Peake’s painting begins by her making an imprint of her body on paper, drawing around it as she moves.
Dance as a social and cultural phenomenon – such as the experience of dancing in a nightclub – is for France-Lise McGurn both a metaphor for and an approach to painting; painting understood and embodied as responsive to material, music, emotion and altered states of consciousness.
Sometimes it is the artists’ medium which is exploited to enhance the viewer’s perception of the moving body. Sculptor Rachel Kneebone pushes the medium of porcelain to its limits and beyond in her work, Dance, from 2017, to suggest some kind of dynamic metamorphosis that is enacted in front of our eyes.
Many of the artists would describe themselves as multidisciplinary; dance and performance being very much part of their wider artistic practice. Karon Davis was a dancer before she was an artist. Coming from a family of performers, Davis’ work alludes to the sacrifices that must be made from a very young age if a child wants to be a ballerina. It is an art form which is centred around some kind of quest for physical, classical perfection. Covering the black figure in white plaster dust, Davis asks poignant questions about what it means to be black in a white, Eurocentric industry.
In the case of Xiyao Wang, charcoal lines and multicoloured oil stick marks suggest traces of energy left behind by the human body. Informed by her own training as a dancer and in martial arts, Wang’s paintings are abstract records of the way the body moves through space and time, and we scrutinise these strokes and lines to try and understand the pathways the body has created.
A quote by artist Stanley Whitney inspired María Berrío, long fascinated by dance, to consider that in the act of painting, one becomes both the dancer and the music. This thinking led to a series of charcoal drawings of imagined young dancers, brimming with poise and resilience.
To create her monumental new painting Staccato, Kylie Manning collaborated with Sara Mearns, Principal Dancer with the New York City Ballet, whose ‘rare combination of strength and delicacy’ in her movement has directly informed Manning’s dynamic mark-making. In Staccato, which refers to a highly punctuated musical rhythm, Manning has captured the energy of Mearns’ motion in real time.
Further highlights include rarely seen works by Paula Rego, from her 1997 series Legend of the Fire, inspired by an ancient Portuguese folk tale. In Rego’s work the movement of a single figure is multiplied across the picture plane, expressing freedom, escape, or a transition of physical or emotional states through time and space.
Image: Paula Rego, Legend of the Fire, 1997. Acrylic on canvas. 77 x 101 cm, 30 1/4 x 39 3/4 in © Estate of Paula Rego. Courtesy Estate of Paula Rego and Victoria Miro.
Rachel Kneebone
About the artist
b. 1973, United Kingdom
Rachel Kneebone's work addresses and questions the human condition: renewal, life cycles and the physical body. Working primarily in sculpture that embraces the unpredictable nature of its medium – porcelain - Kneebone focuses on ideas of movement and metamorphosis, transformation and suspension and the material manifestation of fluid physical states. Kneebone has stated that her work is ‘concerned with inhabiting the body, what it is to be alive in the world’.
Kneebone began working in porcelain around 2002, initially drawn to it for its bone whiteness which is nascent and neutral in feel. Pushing the material beyond its boundaries – and long historical traditions – she works her 'clay body' to maximise its organic response, developing a symbiotic relationship to the medium that involves chance and the loss of overall control. This creative exchange, between artist and material and between the decisive acts of modelling and the unexpected results of the kiln, allows for a dynamic sense of movement in her sculptures where cracks and fissures – and occasional collapse – physically registers the passage of time.
Occupying a near-subliminal space, Kneebone's sculptures can oscillate between the conscious and the subconscious, the real and the imagined, everything and nothing. Densely worked, intricate forms emerge from undulating masses of clay; recumbent limbs stretch out into surrounding space and floral forms, spheres and ribbons interweave and conjoin together. Covered with a clear gloss glaze, light moves across their surfaces, creating dark areas of shadow and highlighting their tension of positive and negative form, motion and calm. This sense of shifting modes of perception is amplified in two of Kneebone's largest works: The Descent (2009) and 399 Days (2012-13), both of which combine composite parts to form large architectonic structures in which formal detail appears ever more magnified and visceral. In The Descent, for example, figures hover, spill and tumble into a central, circular abyss creating a visceral sense of unease, even fear. In 399 Days, a structure of immense size, Kneebone exploits its monumental height and vast expanse to create a sculpture poised in tension between form and fracture, whereby the sheer excess of layered elements across multiple tiles or 'tableaux' simultaneously creates narrative breakdown and visual dissolve.
‘Stories are very important for my work. The creation of other worlds, other times, other spaces and other ways of being,’ Kneebone has remarked. Referencing the history of art – in particular old master painting and classical sculpture – she draws on several key motifs and themes across various series of works. In Still Life Triptych, 2011, for example, multiple forms spill over and emerge from three fractured, classical capitals, while in the Lamentations series (2010) she responds to historical renditions of the Pieta? to explore the timeless themes of loss and grief. More recently, in the ‘Raft of the Medusa’ series (2021), she draws on The?odore Ge?ricault's monumental painting The raft of the Medusa (1818) and its depiction of physical and existential crisis to consider, through the muscular medium of clay, the arc of human life: of hope and despair; birth and death.
Multi-directional and distinctly kinetic in feel, Kneebone's work has been described as 'sculptural choreography'. For the artist, dance can be considered a parallel universe which shares an experience of inhabiting the body. In 2018-19, Kneebone produced ‘The Dance Project’, a series of sculptures and a performance made in collaboration with the choreographer T.C Howard. 'I have always been fascinated by dance: how bodies meld and merge, how new forms are created by dancers, and how dance allows us to escape to a different space and language. My work is deeply concerned with movement, form and space.' she has said.
The experience of movement through space, of physical lightness, is exemplified in recent works such as Rib (2019) or Shell (2021), where Kneebone removes any support base and pushes her sculptural language to near dissolution. Appearing almost free-form, as if unravelling of their own accord, they incorporate increasingly un-modelled areas to allow the clay to act in its own physical manner.
In her drawings, which are produced alongside - rather than as preparatory studies for - the sculptures, Kneebone continues her enquiry into the human condition featuring the simultaneous building and removing of partial, connected and extended figurative forms which freely emerge as the artist rotates the paper while she draws. ‘It’s a shared way of looking, an active looking at and through things; line and shape and form and suggestion, hints or glimpses to follow, bring out or rub away. A movement to fuse things and create new form from a blurring or dissolve of boundaries...’, she has commented.
Rachel Kneebone was born in 1973 in Oxfordshire and lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Serlachius Museum, Ma?ntta?, Finland (2022); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK (2021); White Cube, London (2021); Touchstones, Rochdale, UK (2018); Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2017); White Cube at Glyndebourne, Lewes, UK (2017); The Foundling Museum, London (2017); and Brooklyn Museum, New York (2012). Selected group exhibitions include Freud Museum, London (2024); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2023); Hayward Gallery, London (2022); Bangkok Art Biennale, Thailand (2022); White Cube at Arley Hall, Cheshire, UK (2022); Freelands Foundation, London (2020); Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany (2018);
Sculpture in the Close, University of Cambridge, UK (2017); Maison Particulie?re, Brussels (2016); York Art Gallery, UK (2016); Galleri Anderson Sandstrom, Stockholm (2015); Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2015); Freud Museum, London (2014); 1st Kyiv Biennale, Ukraine (2012); Deutsches- Hygienes Museum, Dresden, Germany (2012); Busan Biennale, South Korea (2010); Barbican Centre, London (2010); 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2008); Yvon Lambert, New York (2007); and Camden Arts Centre, London (2005). In 2005, Kneebone was nominated for the MaxMara Art Prize.
Works presented in Motion in Stillness: Dance and the Human Body in Movement...
Rachel KneeboneGlyndebourne VI, 2016
Rachel KneeboneGlyndebourne X, 2016
Rachel KneeboneRaft VI, 2021
Rachel KneeboneDance, 2017
Rachel KneeboneRaft III, 2021
France-Lise McGurn
About the artist
b. 1983, United Kingdom
France-Lise McGurn was born in Glasgow, UK in 1983. Evading the boundaries of the traditional picture plane, McGurn often eschews the limits of her canvases by extending the imagery directly onto the gallery walls and furniture brought into the space, displacing her subject and creating an immersive environment.
Instead of approaching a static painting, the artist activates the composition allowing the figures and forms to be seen as though in a field of vision. Occasionally confrontational, sometimes passive, sometimes ecstatic, these characters shift through these emotions constantly reforming their personas.Key themes in Mcgurn’s work include music, dreams, memory and popular culture. Her visual sources have included 70s film stills, Janus fetish magazine, Botticelli prints and celebrity autographs. The works are developed intuitively via the artist’s use of swift calligraphic brush marks and attention to the human form. Repeated lines and movement recall antiquity but are similarly influenced by Glasgow’s post-industrial city aesthetic. With her paintings, Mcgurn builds loops through pastel colours, speed and fluid motion. Playing with ideas around circadian rhythms and familiarity her works un-stagnate and are experienced rather than seen.
France-Lise McGurn lives and works in London, she received her MA in 2012 from the Royal College of Art, London, UK. In 2024 McGurn will have a solo show with MASSIMODECARLO and Modern Institute Glasgow. Recent notable solo and two person exhibitions include Margot Samuel, New York (2023); Simon Lee Gallery, London (2023); Glasgow International, Glasgow (2021); Tramway, Glasgow(2020); Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel (2020). Recent group shows include: Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2022); National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2021). McGurn’s work is held in prominent public collections such as K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; David Roberts Collection, London; New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambrdige; TATE, London; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Dallas Museum of Art Foundation, Texas; USA Hill Art Foundation, New York and Stiftung Kunsthaus-Sammlung Pasquart, Biel.
Portrait photocredit: Amy Gwatkin
Works presented in Motion in Stillness: Dance and the Human Body in Movement...
France-Lise McGurnWhy sleep?, 2024
Xiyao Wang
About the artist
b. 1992, Lives and works in Germany
Xiyao Wang is one of the most prominent young voices in abstract painting. Born in 1992 in Chongqing, she currently lives and works in Berlin. Renowned for her powerful, immersive paintings, Wang’s distinctive use of colour, volume and texture spells out her unique vocabulary. As a way for her to transfer experiences and feelings from her internal space into the external world, her work is highly informed by her personal awareness and sensitivity.
Combining various techniques such as oil and acrylic paint, chalk, graphite and oil sticks, she seeks balance between the canvas and the body in physical displacement. Expressive multicoloured lines evoke the broadness of landscapes, movements and thoughts, composing lyrical arrangements that grace the canvas in harmonious, energetic movements layered onto compact pastelcoloured backgrounds.
Through a profound knowledge of both Asian and Western traditions, she instinctively combines influences from Taoism and dance with martial arts. Brimming with energy, her large-scale works capture movement on canvas.
Recent solo exhibitions include: MASSIMODECARLO, Milan (2024); Song Art Museum (2024); Galerie Perrotin, New York (2024); MASSIMODECARLO, London (2023); Galerie Perrotin, Seoul (2023); Galerie Perrotin, Paris (2022); Arndt Collection (2022). Her work has been included in recent group shows at: Yuan Art Museum (2024); Tank Shanghai (2024); K11 Art Foundation (2024); MASSIMODECARLO, Milan (2022); Aurora Museum, Shanghai (2022); Jiu Shi Art Museum, Shanghai (2022); Tang Contemporary Art, Seoul (2022); König Galerie, Berlin (2021); and Spinnerei, Leipzig (2020).
Portrait credit: Roberto Marossi, Milan
Works presented in Motion in Stillness: Dance and the Human Body in Movement...
Xiyao WangZhuangzi Dreaming of Becoming a Butterfly No. 3, 2023
Florence Peake
About the artist
b. 1973, United Kingdom
Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice since 1995.
Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and the public realm, Peake is known for an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate. Peake produces movement, interactive sculpture, paintings that use the whole body's physicality, text, film and drawings which respond and intercept each other to articulate, extend and push ideas.
Peake's work explores notions of materiality and physicality: the body as site and vehicle of protest; the erotic and sensual as tools for queering materiality; the subjective and imagined body as a force equal to those that move in our objective flesh-bound world. By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, Peake creates radical and outlandish performances, which in turn generate temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience. Peake's painting is as an extension of the body itself: it is produced gesturally and performatively, and is both a manifestation of the external body in motion and the way personal experience and feeling is recorded within the tissue and bones. Her painting practice comes together with sculpture and performance in a reciprocal nature: engaging in a shared dialogue and creating multiple modes of processing performance, and the interrelations between dancers, audiences and sites.
Peake has worked with filmmakers, artists and choreographers including Joe Moran, Gaby Agis, Tai Shani, Jonathan Baldock, Serena Korda, Nicola Conibere, Gary Stevens, Catherine Hoffmann, Eve Stainton, Station House Opera and Theatre of Mistakes. Peake's touring institutional solo exhibition Factual Actual: Ensemble will be presented at Southwark Park Galleries, London; Towner Eastbourne and Fruitmarket, Edinburgh (2023/2024). Her work was part of the Hayward Gallery's touring British Art Show 9 (2021). Peake's work has been presented at Arsenic theatre and Sudpol theatre in Switzerland (2020),Venice Biennale 2019; CRAC Occitanie, Sète, France (2018), London Contemporary Music Festival, UK (2018), Bosse & Baum, London, UK (2019); De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2018); Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France (2018); Hayward Gallery, London UK (2018), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2017), Studio Leigh, London UK (2017); Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome, Italy (2017); Serpentine, London UK (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); ICA, London (2016); Modern Art Oxford (2016); BALTIC, Newcastle UK (2013), Frieze, London UK (2013), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2012).
Works presented in Motion in Stillness: Dance and the Human Body in Movement...
Florence PeakeFalling, Landing all at once 2, 2024
Florence PeakeFalling, Landing all at once 1, 2024
Kylie Manning
About the artist
b. 1983, USA
Kylie Manning is a painter based in Brooklyn, New York. Both art teachers, Manning's parents often moved their home in Juneau, Alaska, to various regions in Mexico for extended periods. Manning's work is heavily informed by the atmospheres, latitudes, and colors present in the various geographies of her childhood, where she witnessed the impacts of social, political, and economic change.
Using brushwork, light, and balance, the artist captures moments within her personal history, such as her time working on Alaskan fishing boats and memories of surfing in Mexico. Her works primarily originate from within themselves, but she also sources imagery from old family photographs. Her oil paint compositions center on ethereal, gestural, and genderless figures within expansive, disparate landscapes. While some appear more clearly, other figures are defined by lyrical swathes of paint suggesting a face and the outline of a body. Manning purposefully leaves the origin, gender, and raison d'être of the forms within her paintings up to interpretation, allowing the viewer to step into her world, yet form their own reading of the work. The resulting powerful works vibrate with energy and light, flickering before the viewer's eyes.
Manning explores the balance between figuration and abstraction through expert draftsmanship, painting, mark-making, and a refined technical process. Within her painting practice, the artist begins each body of work as a family, stretching the surfaces and employing rabbit skin glue, which primes the canvas and provides a buoyant backdrop. She spends a great deal of time spreading oil ground (a material used to prime oil paintings) with a palette knife, before sanding down each layer, building a relationship to each individual piece before she brings in color. She is acutely aware of the scale, energy, and groove of the linen before ‘beginning.’ There are no sketches or predetermined compositions; she finds the image with and in front of the viewer so they may determine how the piece was formed.
When Manning eventually incorporates color, it begins through a hierarchy of refracted light. She grinds pure pigments with safflower oil and starts with a Sumi-e-like wash using broad chip brushes and paint rollers to create thin but wide strokes along. While still wet, she takes a rag and begins to pull the composition out by wiping and ripping away saturated areas. Eventually sketching in paint with loaded brushes, she reiterates or shifts the composition. Each layer is separated with a slightly thicker layer of safflower and walnut oil to refract light, a technique common with Dutch Baroque painters, such as Johannes Vermeer. Orchestrating ethereal sketches of landscapes and figures, she balances delicate whirlwinds of color with a contemporary feminist sense of humor. Manning’s works feel simultaneously thin and radiant, light glowing from within the paintings themselves.
Of Manning, the artist Gaby Collins-Fernandez says: “For Manning, paint is a medium of inconsistency. If a line can be used to describe the parameter of a body which would not exist otherwise, it can also break the continuity of a painted picture. A line can misbehave, it can unstick itself from its place in proper perspective; can contour the wrong parts of the story; remind us that images are not a given in art. If eyes can gaze back at a viewer, so can stains. If brushwork can evoke water, grasses, and mists, it can also do a dance led less by grace than excitement, unsettling a painting laterally, in ripples. If gesture is a language, so are expressions and emoticons.”
Through her practice, Manning re-contextualizes the concept of traditionally gendered “masterpieces" with an eye toward contemporary feminism. Her visual lexicon is as much in conversation with J.M.W. Turner and Frans Hals as it is Ruth Asawa and Berthe Morisot. The Art Historian Theodore Barrow notes that, “Manning’s work engages with the sublime in both senses: drawing from an epic tradition of seascapes of [Claude-Joseph] Vernet, Turner, [Gustave] Courbet, and [Winslow] Homer, in which immersive, fluid brushstrokes stoke aural networks, so that one feels them viscerally as much as optically. But ‘sublime’ also means to vaporize, to sublimate, and the abstract quality of her work, held in tightrope suspension above the figurative, beckons a non-verbal connection, a sensate bond that speaks to the body, not the mind.”
Manning is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts with a double Major in Philosophy and Visual Arts. While earning a master's degree from the New York Academy of Art, Manning was sent to Leipzig, Germany to exhibit and work alongside the New Leipzig School where she had a studio down the hall from the artists such Christiane Baumgartner and Neo Rauch. In Germany, she was exposed to this school's version of Surrealism, whose tenets she now experiments with in her practice.
Manning has been practicing and exhibiting her work for over fifteen years. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include Kylie Manning: Aftermath, Sabines Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuxtla Gutierrez, Mexico (2015); Kylie Manning: Waldeinsamkeit, KN Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2017); and Kylie Manning: Zweisamkeit - Being in Two Is No More Than Doubled Solitude, Anonymous Gallery, New York (2021). Her work is held in numerous collections worldwide including the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida; X Museum, Beijing, China; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China.
Portrait of Kylie Manning © Meghan Marin
Works presented in Motion in Stillness: Dance and the Human Body in Movement...
Kylie ManningStaccato, 2024
Kylie ManningSara II, 2023
Kylie ManningChun, 2023
Kylie ManningIndiana, 2023
Karon Davis
About the artist
b. 1977, USA
Karon Davis (b. 1977, Reno, Nevada) creates sculptures and multimedia installations that touch on issues of history, race, and violence in the United States, using materials as varied as plaster strips, chicken wire, glass, and readymade objects. Drawing on her background in theater and film, Davis creates haunting tableaux inhabited by protagonists both historical and imagined. The figures are created using the artist’s unique plaster method, amalgamations of life-size casts taken from friends and family as well as her own body. The material reflects her longtime interest in ancient Egyptian mummification practices, using wrapping to memorialize different bodies and their complex histories.
In Fall 2024 the artist will be included in a number of significant group exhibitions, including Edges of Ailey, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Movements Toward Freedom, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project, The California African American Museum, Los Angeles; and American Vignettes: Symbols, Society, and Satire, at the Rubell Museum, Washington, D.C. The artist’s work was previously the subject of Karon Davis: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection at the Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles in 2023. She was also commissioned by The High Line, New York, to create a monumental bowing ballerina in bronze, Curtain Call, which is on view December 2023 through November 2024.
Davis’ work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (CA); the Pérez Art Museum, Miami (FL); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (CA); the Rubell Museum, Miami (FL); the Brooklyn Museum (NY), and MAC3, Los Angeles (CA) among others. In 2017 Davis was the recipient of The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant.
Portrait of Karon Davis. Photo by Elon Schoenholz. Image courtesy the artist and Salon 94.
Works presented in Motion in Stillness: Dance and the Human Body in Movement...
Karon DavisAvery, 2023
Megan Rooney
About the artist
b. 1985, United Kingdom
An enigmatic storyteller, Megan Rooney works across a variety of media – including painting, sculpture, installation, performance and language – to develop interwoven narratives. The body has a sustained presence in her work, both as the subjective starting point and final site for the sedimentation of experience. Painting on uniform canvases measuring 200 x 150 cm – the wingspan of the average woman – Rooney presents layered ethereal forms, often sanded back and painted over multiple times to create abstracted narratives without a discernible beginning or end. The artist’s large-scale murals, ephemeral creations that respond to the surrounding architectural space, create enveloping environments, while painterly elements seem to take on a life of their own in her performance works, with dancers moving to the scores of her prose poems. The subjects of Rooney’s works are drawn directly from her own life, and recurring motifs address the effects of politics and society in the home and on the female body, as well as obliquely referencing some of the most urgent issues of our time.
Based in London, Rooney grew up between South Africa, Brazil and Canada, completing her BA at the University of Toronto, followed by an MA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College, London in 2011. Her work has been shown in recent solo museum exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2024); Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2020–21); Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2020); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2019); and Tramway, Glasgow (2017). Her performance EVERYWHERE BEEN THERE, created in collaboration with choreographer Temitope Ajose-Cutting and musician Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, premiered at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 2019. The year prior, she performed SUN DOWN MOON UP as part of the Serpentine Galleries' Park Nights programme in London. Rooney's work has also been presented in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2022); Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen (2021); Lyon Biennale (2019); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2019 and 2017); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Venice Biennale (2017); and David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2017 and 2014), among others. Her work is held in major institutional collections, including the Ackland Art Museum, North Carolina; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Frac Île-de-France, Paris; Museum MCAN, West Jakarta; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; and Muzeul de Art? Recent?, Bucharest, among others.
Works presented in Motion in Stillness: Dance and the Human Body in Movement...
Megan RooneyNight Folly, 2024
Paula Rego
About the artist
(1935 - 2022)
An artist of uncompromising vision and a peerless storyteller, Paula Rego (1935–2022) brought immense psychological insight and imaginative power to the genre of figurative art. Drawing upon details of her own extraordinary life, on politics and art history, on literature, folk legends, myths and fairytales, Rego’s work at its heart is an exploration of human relationships, her piercing eye trained on the established order and the codes, structures and dynamics of power that embolden or repress the characters she depicts. Often turning hierarchies on their heads, her tableaux, whether tender or tragic, consider the complexities of human experience and the experience of women in particular. She is especially celebrated for works that forcibly address aspects of female agency and resolve, suffering and survival, such as the Dog Women series, begun in 1994, the Abortion series, 1998–99, which is considered to have influenced Portugal’s successful second referendum on the legalisation of abortion in 2007, and the recent series Female Genital Mutilation, 2008–09.
Rego’s art transcends the art world. She is heralded as a feminist icon and is a household name. In her native Portugal the government commissioned the celebrated architect Eduardo Souto de Moura to design and build a museum dedicated exclusively to her work – Paula Rego’s House of Stories, situated in Cascais, which opened to the public in 2009. In the UK, where she attended the Slade School of Fine Art from 1952–56, her first major solo exhibition in London was held at AIR Gallery in 1981, followed in 1988 by an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. She was appointed the first National Gallery Associate Artist in 1989–90. She has been the subject of numerous books and TV programmes, including Paula Rego, Secrets & Stories, a BBC documentary directed by the artist’s son Nick Willing, which won the Royal Television Award for Best Arts Program in 2018, and The Southbank Show in 1992 and 2007. Her art continues to have an enduring influence upon younger generations, who are introduced to her work through the GCSE syllabus. In 2010 she was made a Dame of The British Empire by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Photo: Portrait of Paula Rego, 2021. © Gautier Deblonde. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro
Works presented in Motion in Stillness: Dance and the Human Body in Movement...
Paula RegoLegend of the Fire, 1997
Paula RegoLegend of the Fire - A Lenda do Fogo, 1997
María Berrío
About the artist
b. 1982, Bogotá, Colombia
Based in Brooklyn, María Berrío grew up in Colombia. Her large-scale works, which are meticulously crafted from layers of Japanese paper, reflect on cross-cultural connections and global migration seen through the prism of her own history.
Populated predominantly by women, Berrío’s art often appears to propose spaces of refuge or safety, kaleidoscopic utopias which in the past have been inspired in part by South American folklore, where humans and nature coexist in harmony. To these apparently idealised scenes, however, Berrío brings to light the hard realities of present-day politics. For example, Oda a la Esperanza (Ode to Hope), 2019, in which girls appear captive within an institution-like environment, refers to the Trump administration’s family separation policy. Wildflowers, 2017, which depicts numerous women, children and animals has at its centre a railway carriage that might equally refer to the New York City subway or the train known as La Bestia, which transports migrants across Mexico to the US border. Writing in the catalogue for the New Orleans Triennial Prospect. 4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, where the work was shown in 2017–2018, Alexandra Giniger comments that ‘In her canvases, animals, though plentiful, take a secondary role to women, who dominate en masse. The message may be that we, as humans, must task ourselves ever more staunchly with protecting one another through these swampy times.’
Speaking about the women that feature in her work, the artist says 'They are embodied ideals of femininity. The ghostly pallor of their skin suggests an otherworldliness; they appear to be more spirit that flesh. These are the women I want to be: strong, vulnerable, compassionate, courageous, and in harmony with themselves and nature. They combine the elements of women who are typically thought of as powerful – the captains of industry, resolute politicians, fiery activists – with the traits of those who are not usually thought of as such, thereby underlining the common force found in all women. The female soldier fighting on the front lines is of interest, but so too is the mother who finds a way to feed her children and sing them to sleep amid bombing campaigns and in the ruins of cities. To truly ennoble womanhood, we must discover and appreciate the beauty in every action, big or small.' (Georgia Review, Spring 2019).
An enduring interest in the human relationship with nature can be seen in a new series of figures, which the artist calls ‘the bathers’. United by a simple garment – based on one of Berrío’s own dresses – the figures appear in moments of solemnity, acting upon or reacting to the natural world. The surreal environments they occupy offer an unsettling context for their otherwise ordinary activities, provoking viewers to reflect on their own connection to their surroundings and raising questions of resilience and persistence in the face of catastrophic loss. The primal ritual of bathing and the gestures that bracket it offer a moment of communion that reflects on our common experiences as social beings.
About the artist
María Berrío was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1982, completed her BFA at Parsons School of Design in 2004, and her MFA at the New York School of Visual Arts.
Major solo exhibitions include María Berrío: The Children’s Crusade, ICA Boston, USA (2023); María Berrío: Esperando mientras la noche florece (Waiting for the Night to Bloom), The Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, USA (2021). Institutional group exhibitions include Spirit in the Land, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA (2023), travelling to Pérez Art Museum, Miami, USA (2024) and Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, USA (2024–2025); Women Painting Women, The Modern, Fort Worth, Texas, USA (2022); A Natural Turn, The DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, USA (2022); Born in Flames: Feminist Futures, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, USA (2021); Labor: Motherhood & Art in 2020, University Art Museum at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, USA (2020); Present Tense: Recent Gifts of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, USA (2019); People Get Ready at Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina, USA (2018); Prospect.4 Triennial, New Orleans, USA (2017–2018), Art on Paper Biennial, Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA (2017), CUT N MIX, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, USA (2015).
Berrío’s work is in permanent collections including the Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, USA; Dallas Museum of Art, USA; Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice, New York, USA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, USA; Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston and Miami, USA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), USA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, USA; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, USA; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, USA; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Florida, USA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, USA; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, USA; Weatherspoon Museum of Art at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China.
Additionally, her work can also be seen in the public realm at the N subway stop at Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, where 14 of the artist’s works have been translated in mosaic using a variety of media including glass, ceramic and enamel.
Portrait of Maria Berrio, 2023. Photo: Kyle Dorosz. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro
Works presented in Motion in Stillness: Dance and the Human Body in Movement...
María BerríoUntitled 7, 2024
María BerríoUntitled 8, 2024
Sheet: 31.3 cm × 43.2 cm
Framed: 45.4 × 57.5 × 3.8 cm
To create this new work, Manning asked Sara Mearns, Principal Dancer with the New York City Ballet, to sit for her. The dancers of NYCB are renowned for their dynamism, athleticism and speed and these qualities are evident in Manning’s fiercely energetic and fluid handling of paint. Manning was drawn to what she describes as Mearns’s ‘rare combination of strength and delicacy’ in movement. At the centre of the composition, she paints the serene face of Mearns, a still point amidst the centrifugal force of her own body, which Manning suggests is arching, bending, folding and reaching around her.
Flickering white highlights imply a body in constant motion and rapid, swirling brushstrokes prevent our eye from settling. To look is to be caught up in the explosive action that is unfolding in front of us. The title of the work, Staccato, adds to the image the sound of a sharp, punctuated musical rhythm and evokes a sense of duration.
In 2023, Manning collaborated with choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon, designing sets for a new ballet for New York City Ballet entitled From You Within Me. These graphite ‘gesture’ studies, as Manning refers to them, exhibited here for first time, were made in the studios of New York City Ballet and were an attempt to record the continuous, rapid movement of dancers’ bodies at the very moment that Wheeldon found the shapes and vocabulary he desired. As Wheeldon coaxed new shapes from the dancers, so Manning tried to capture that process on paper, describing the resulting sketches as ‘a visual metronome.’
Legs that extend, bend and kick erupt from the surface, a writhing mass of movement interspersed with rippling fabric and organic forms. It is as though some kind of dynamic metamorphosis is enacted in front of our eyes – what Kneebone refers to as ‘the pulse of life.’ Astonishingly, this illusion of continuous movement is created through porcelain, a medium that although malleable when wet, hardens to become one of the most brittle. Kneebone pushes the medium of porcelain to its limits. This work partly collapsed in the kiln, losing some of its verticality, but finding beauty and movement in the result, this then becomes an important part of how she depicts the body moving in time and space.
This sculpture was originally made for an exhibition and performance project entitled The Dance Project (2018–19). The pencil drawings show Kneebone’s continued interest in how to portray a body moving through space to suggest duration. Elongated limbs that have multiplied and fused, feet touching feet, fall through the air. Our eye sees movement as we follow the shapes of the tumbling, twisting, arched forms.
A visual artist, performer and choreographer, the media of Peake’s artistic practice are absolutely intertwined. This pair of paintings, specially made for this exhibition, form part on an ongoing series of work that Peake refers to as ‘Factual Actual.’ The process begins with her making a factual imprint of her own body on paper, drawing around it as she moves. She then builds on this embodied tracing, painting over to add marks that recall the sensations of the movement itself.
In these works, her body seems to twist from side to side, tumbling forward and upside down and we see multiple arms, breasts and heads. This multiplicity of bodies, Peake says, reflects the fact that we are multidimensional beings, which cannot be confined to single version of the self. As she adds marks to the paper, she also edits out, inviting us to contrast the imagined body with its objective form.
A visual artist, performer and choreographer, the media of Peake’s artistic practice are absolutely intertwined. This pair of paintings, specially made for this exhibition, form part on an ongoing series of work that Peake refers to as ‘Factual Actual.’ The process begins with her making a factual imprint of her own body on paper, drawing around it as she moves. She then builds on this embodied tracing, painting over to add marks that recall the sensations of the movement itself.
In these works, her body seems to twist from side to side, tumbling forward and upside down and we see multiple arms, breasts and heads. This multiplicity of bodies, Peake says, reflects the fact that we are multidimensional beings, which cannot be confined to single version of the self. As she adds marks to the paper, she also edits out, inviting us to contrast the imagined body with its objective form.
Legs that extend, bend and kick erupt from the surface, a writhing mass of movement interspersed with rippling fabric and organic forms. It is as though some kind of dynamic metamorphosis is enacted in front of our eyes – what Kneebone refers to as ‘the pulse of life.’ Astonishingly, this illusion of continuous movement is created through porcelain, a medium that although malleable when wet, hardens to become one of the most brittle. Kneebone pushes the medium of porcelain to its limits. This work partly collapsed in the kiln, losing some of its verticality, but finding beauty and movement in the result, this then becomes an important part of how she depicts the body moving in time and space.
This sculpture was originally made for an exhibition and performance project entitled The Dance Project (2018–19). The pencil drawings show Kneebone’s continued interest in how to portray a body moving through space to suggest duration. Elongated limbs that have multiplied and fused, feet touching feet, fall through the air. Our eye sees movement as we follow the shapes of the tumbling, twisting, arched forms.
Legs that extend, bend and kick erupt from the surface, a writhing mass of movement interspersed with rippling fabric and organic forms. It is as though some kind of dynamic metamorphosis is enacted in front of our eyes – what Kneebone refers to as ‘the pulse of life.’ Astonishingly, this illusion of continuous movement is created through porcelain, a medium that although malleable when wet, hardens to become one of the most brittle. Kneebone pushes the medium of porcelain to its limits. This work partly collapsed in the kiln, losing some of its verticality, but finding beauty and movement in the result, this then becomes an important part of how she depicts the body moving in time and space.
This sculpture was originally made for an exhibition and performance project entitled The Dance Project (2018–19). The pencil drawings show Kneebone’s continued interest in how to portray a body moving through space to suggest duration. Elongated limbs that have multiplied and fused, feet touching feet, fall through the air. Our eye sees movement as we follow the shapes of the tumbling, twisting, arched forms.
Sheet: 31.3 cm × 43.2 cm
Framed: 45.4 × 57.5 × 3.8 cm
To create this new work, Manning asked Sara Mearns, Principal Dancer with the New York City Ballet, to sit for her. The dancers of NYCB are renowned for their dynamism, athleticism and speed and these qualities are evident in Manning’s fiercely energetic and fluid handling of paint. Manning was drawn to what she describes as Mearns’s ‘rare combination of strength and delicacy’ in movement. At the centre of the composition, she paints the serene face of Mearns, a still point amidst the centrifugal force of her own body, which Manning suggests is arching, bending, folding and reaching around her.
Flickering white highlights imply a body in constant motion and rapid, swirling brushstrokes prevent our eye from settling. To look is to be caught up in the explosive action that is unfolding in front of us. The title of the work, Staccato, adds to the image the sound of a sharp, punctuated musical rhythm and evokes a sense of duration.
In 2023, Manning collaborated with choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon, designing sets for a new ballet for New York City Ballet entitled From You Within Me. These graphite ‘gesture’ studies, as Manning refers to them, exhibited here for first time, were made in the studios of New York City Ballet and were an attempt to record the continuous, rapid movement of dancers’ bodies at the very moment that Wheeldon found the shapes and vocabulary he desired. As Wheeldon coaxed new shapes from the dancers, so Manning tried to capture that process on paper, describing the resulting sketches as ‘a visual metronome.’
The Legend of the Fire was a Portuguese folk tale Rego first heard when she was a child growing up in Cascais, near Lisbon. It is the disturbing story of a little girl who lived with her grandparents and family dog. One night, the bogeymen (‘papões’) tried to break in but the dog barked and scared them away. Furious at being woken by the dog, the grandparents cut of its tail. The next night, the bogeymen re-appeared and were once again scared off by the family dog. This time the grandparents cut off a leg. This continues, night after night, until the dog is dead. The following night the bogeymen break in, kill the grandparents, put the little girl in a sack and take her off to the woods.
It is the next moment in the story that Rego depicts. Rescued by a fox, whose tail catches on fire, the little girl must jump over a fire to escape. While the fox is visible skulking away across the bottom of one of the two paintings, Rego paints the little girl leaping over the flames, arms and legs outstretched, mouth open as she cries out. What we see is not three girls but one, caught in sequential action.
Rego described her heroine as having her arms flung out ‘like a sacrifice’ and indeed the tale was purportedly told to young girls to prepare them for future sacrifice. For now, as Rego would tell her own children, the little girl is free – a sentiment conveyed by the sense of wild abandon with which she imbues the works.
The Legend of the Fire was a Portuguese folk tale Rego first heard when she was a child growing up in Cascais, near Lisbon. It is the disturbing story of a little girl who lived with her grandparents and family dog. One night, the bogeymen (‘papões’) tried to break in but the dog barked and scared them away. Furious at being woken by the dog, the grandparents cut of its tail. The next night, the bogeymen re-appeared and were once again scared off by the family dog. This time the grandparents cut off a leg. This continues, night after night, until the dog is dead. The following night the bogeymen break in, kill the grandparents, put the little girl in a sack and take her off to the woods.
It is the next moment in the story that Rego depicts. Rescued by a fox, whose tail catches on fire, the little girl must jump over a fire to escape. While the fox is visible skulking away across the bottom of one of the two paintings, Rego paints the little girl leaping over the flames, arms and legs outstretched, mouth open as she cries out. What we see is not three girls but one, caught in sequential action.
Rego described her heroine as having her arms flung out ‘like a sacrifice’ and indeed the tale was purportedly told to young girls to prepare them for future sacrifice. For now, as Rego would tell her own children, the little girl is free – a sentiment conveyed by the sense of wild abandon with which she imbues the works.
‘I weld paint in order to try and bring us back inside of our bodies,’ Rooney explains of her uniquely physical approach to making a painting. Jogging daily to her studio to summon the energy she needs, she moves her body constantly around the canvas as she works – shuffling, reaching, crawling, bending – the result of which is a paint surface made up of huge variety of different marks. The energy of this surface is palpable, disorientating and compelling. Rooney describes herself as ‘a construction worker’, building up layers of paint over a long period of time only to ‘excavate’ (sand it off), when the rhythm of the painting requires. Colour becomes her ‘collaborator’, punctuating and articulating the canvas like a musical rhythm. The present work is one of Rooney's so-called 'wingspan paintings', the canvas measurements cut according to the wingspan of an average woman.
Rooney, who danced herself, frequently presents her work alongside dance that has been choreographed in response to it. The titles of her works reference memories of place or times of day and the palette always responds to the season in which the work was made. The bluey green undertones of this painting echo the darker days of January, when this painting began its life. Describing it as one of her ‘night paintings’, Rooney adds small touches of intense pink and yellow paint that suggest city lights emerging from the velvety darkness.
Legs that extend, bend and kick erupt from the surface, a writhing mass of movement interspersed with rippling fabric and organic forms. It is as though some kind of dynamic metamorphosis is enacted in front of our eyes – what Kneebone refers to as ‘the pulse of life.’ Astonishingly, this illusion of continuous movement is created through porcelain, a medium that although malleable when wet, hardens to become one of the most brittle. Kneebone pushes the medium of porcelain to its limits. This work partly collapsed in the kiln, losing some of its verticality, but finding beauty and movement in the result, this then becomes an important part of how she depicts the body moving in time and space.
This sculpture was originally made for an exhibition and performance project entitled The Dance Project (2018–19). The pencil drawings show Kneebone’s continued interest in how to portray a body moving through space to suggest duration. Elongated limbs that have multiplied and fused, feet touching feet, fall through the air. Our eye sees movement as we follow the shapes of the tumbling, twisting, arched forms.
Legs that extend, bend and kick erupt from the surface, a writhing mass of movement interspersed with rippling fabric and organic forms. It is as though some kind of dynamic metamorphosis is enacted in front of our eyes – what Kneebone refers to as ‘the pulse of life.’ Astonishingly, this illusion of continuous movement is created through porcelain, a medium that although malleable when wet, hardens to become one of the most brittle. Kneebone pushes the medium of porcelain to its limits. This work partly collapsed in the kiln, losing some of its verticality, but finding beauty and movement in the result, this then becomes an important part of how she depicts the body moving in time and space.
This sculpture was originally made for an exhibition and performance project entitled The Dance Project (2018–19). The pencil drawings show Kneebone’s continued interest in how to portray a body moving through space to suggest duration. Elongated limbs that have multiplied and fused, feet touching feet, fall through the air. Our eye sees movement as we follow the shapes of the tumbling, twisting, arched forms.
Sheet: 31.3 cm × 43.2 cm
Framed: 45.4 × 57.5 × 3.8 cm
To create this new work, Manning asked Sara Mearns, Principal Dancer with the New York City Ballet, to sit for her. The dancers of NYCB are renowned for their dynamism, athleticism and speed and these qualities are evident in Manning’s fiercely energetic and fluid handling of paint. Manning was drawn to what she describes as Mearns’s ‘rare combination of strength and delicacy’ in movement. At the centre of the composition, she paints the serene face of Mearns, a still point amidst the centrifugal force of her own body, which Manning suggests is arching, bending, folding and reaching around her.
Flickering white highlights imply a body in constant motion and rapid, swirling brushstrokes prevent our eye from settling. To look is to be caught up in the explosive action that is unfolding in front of us. The title of the work, Staccato, adds to the image the sound of a sharp, punctuated musical rhythm and evokes a sense of duration.
In 2023, Manning collaborated with choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon, designing sets for a new ballet for New York City Ballet entitled From You Within Me. These graphite ‘gesture’ studies, as Manning refers to them, exhibited here for first time, were made in the studios of New York City Ballet and were an attempt to record the continuous, rapid movement of dancers’ bodies at the very moment that Wheeldon found the shapes and vocabulary he desired. As Wheeldon coaxed new shapes from the dancers, so Manning tried to capture that process on paper, describing the resulting sketches as ‘a visual metronome.’
To create this new work, Manning asked Sara Mearns, Principal Dancer with the New York City Ballet, to sit for her. The dancers of NYCB are renowned for their dynamism, athleticism and speed and these qualities are evident in Manning’s fiercely energetic and fluid handling of paint. Manning was drawn to what she describes as Mearns’s ‘rare combination of strength and delicacy’ in movement. At the centre of the composition, she paints the serene face of Mearns, a still point amidst the centrifugal force of her own body, which Manning suggests is arching, bending, folding and reaching around her.
Flickering white highlights imply a body in constant motion and rapid, swirling brushstrokes prevent our eye from settling. To look is to be caught up in the explosive action that is unfolding in front of us. The title of the work, Staccato, adds to the image the sound of a sharp, punctuated musical rhythm and evokes a sense of duration.
In 2023, Manning collaborated with choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon, designing sets for a new ballet for New York City Ballet entitled From You Within Me. These graphite ‘gesture’ studies, as Manning refers to them, exhibited here for first time, were made in the studios of New York City Ballet and were an attempt to record the continuous, rapid movement of dancers’ bodies at the very moment that Wheeldon found the shapes and vocabulary he desired. As Wheeldon coaxed new shapes from the dancers, so Manning tried to capture that process on paper, describing the resulting sketches as ‘a visual metronome.’
Two poised, young dancers stand before us, their gaze arrested as if concentrating on a teacher's corrections mid-class. Captured in a lively, naturalistic manner, these charcoal studies are in fact drawn from the artist’s imagination, to be used in her paintings, as Berrío explains, like characters in a novel or play. Although she has long been fascinated by dance, a remark by the American abstract artist Stanley Whitney about his need to ‘become the music’ when painting inspired Berrío to begin making work her own work around the subject.
Two poised, young dancers stand before us, their gaze arrested as if concentrating on a teacher's corrections mid-class. Captured in a lively, naturalistic manner, these charcoal studies are in fact drawn from the artist’s imagination, to be used in her paintings, as Berrío explains, like characters in a novel or play. Although she has long been fascinated by dance, a remark by the American abstract artist Stanley Whitney about his need to ‘become the music’ when painting inspired Berrío to begin making work her own work around the subject.
Inspired by the Dionysian, euphoric experience of dancing in nightclubs, McGurn’s paintings are an attempt to capture this liberating experience. ‘I’m not depicting dance, but I’m painting the way I would dance,’ she explains. Lost in the moment, the central female figure is painted in fragmentary form, multiple times across the canvas, as though seen through a white, flashing strobe light. Using washes of colour and dynamic, fluid and linear brushstrokes that violate the boundaries of the canvas itself, the artist pulls us in amongst the entangled, intimate, dancing bodies she paints.
Charcoal lines and multicoloured oil marks suggest traces of energy left behind by the human body. Informed by her own training as a dancer and in martial arts, Wang’s paintings are abstract records of the way the body moves through space and time, and we scrutinise these strokes and lines to try and understand the pathways the body has created.
The title alludes to a story told by the 4th-century BCE Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou, commonly known as Zhuangzi. In his eponymous text, Zhuangzi fell asleep and dreamt he was a butterfly; when he awoke, he couldn’t tell if he was Zhuangzi dreaming of a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of Zhuangzi. It is a story that is meant to illustrate the change of consciousness that comes with the transformation from reality to illusion and it reminds philosophers to question even their most basic assumptions.
Wang’s preference for large canvases evokes a boundless, endless space. ‘I want to translate my bodily experience on to the canvas’, Wang says, but in the process of painting, ‘my perception of the body disappears and I feel I can fly…. It is a state of complete freedom.’
