George Rouy Paints the Body Electric

When George Rouy arrived at Camberwell College of Arts in London, in 2012, he was dismayed to find that his talent for life drawing seemed to count for little. “Figurative painting was the most untrendy, non-vogue thing to do,” he says. “So I felt a bit lost. I was doing sculpture, but I wasn’t really feeling it.”

Twelve years on, the tables have turned: Not only is the British art world full of exciting young painters of the human figure, from Louise Giovanelli to Jake Grewal, but Rouy himself could not be hotter. Last year, at age 30, he became the youngest artist to be represented by Hauser & Wirth. This past fall, the blockbuster gallery staged in London a celebrated exhibition, “The Bleed, Part I,” which showcased Rouy’s oversize, mysteriously blurred and distorted, sometimes faceless figures, often depicted merging into one another or in groups.

“The Bleed, Part II” is happening this month in Los Angeles. “Certain paintings will mirror each other,” Rouy says of the correspondence between the two shows. “But I’m pushing things a little bit further. I’ve been working on these silvery-gray monochrome pieces, which I call phantom paintings.” The opening of the exhibition will be accompanied by the U.S. premiere of Bodysuit, a collaborative creation with the acclaimed modern dancer and choreographer Sharon Eyal, with costumes designed by the British fashion house 16Arlington. Rouy is making a 13-foot canvas that will be in situ within the performance. “These paintings are almost completely abstract, but they still feel bodily,” says Rouy. “I have these two kinds of extremes going on in the studio at the moment—works with formed figures and then these more rhythmic, abstract pieces.”

Rouy’s studio is in Faversham, Kent, about 50 miles southeast of London. He paints while listening to music by Fontaines D.C. and Floating Points, and says the place is so functional that “I don’t even have a chair in there. It’s very much where you do the work, shut the door, and go home.” Up the road is his house, a converted 19th-century church. Rouy shows me the space, which is full of musical instruments—he sings and plays guitar and piano, and is making music that will be featured in Bodysuit. He also made his own furniture. “The building is flint-walled and sandstone, so I made these kind of coffee tables out of flint,” says the artist, gesturing at some starkly minimal plinths.

Rouy, who got the place four years ago, says that he didn’t set out to live in a church as much as an open-plan living space. “I don’t really like rooms as such, the idea of doors being closed,” he says. He enjoys having friends over for dinner, though he skipped his annual Halloween party last year. “There was too much socializing during the show, and I had to do loads of talks and I was, like, having 100 people in the house.… I didn’t think I could stomach it.”

Rouy says that he isn’t a party animal, although “I like a drink.” But his house parties are much talked about by those who go—a young, glamorous, creative crowd that includes his girlfriend, Tali Lennox (a fellow artist and the daughter of the singer Annie Lennox), and the photographer Kingsley Ifill, who has documented Rouy since meeting him at a dinner organized by Dazed magazine for up-and-coming artists eight years ago.

Some of Rouy’s friends are connected to him through his gallerist Hannah Barry, who continues to represent him in a joint arrangement with Hauser & Wirth. There is Danny Fox, a 38-year-old figurative painter from Cornwall; another friend (not represented by Barry) is 31-year-old sculptor Jesse Pollock, who also lives in Faversham. “It’s not people getting out of their heads and being crazy,” Ifill says of nights at Rouy’s place. “It’s just a nice group of people together. George is comfortable in his own skin, and he works very hard.”

One demarcated part of the church’s vast nave is Rouy’s bedroom; there’s a sauna, and the artist has installed some skylights “because I don’t really like artificial light—it makes me feel a bit wired.” The natural light also helps him deal with the cold. “I’ve got underfloor heating in this area here, so it takes the edge off it, but with those high ceilings the bills are expensive.”

His heating costs may be high, but so are the prices for Rouy’s work. One of his paintings sold for $195,619 at Christie’s, London, in March 2023, and another two took about $110,000 between them at auction last year. Rouy’s twisted figures with anguished expressions—or faces so distorted that their expressions cannot be read—have drawn comparisons to Francis Bacon’s paintings, but Bacon is just one among a pantheon of great figurative painters who Rouy says have influenced him. “You’re always looking up at these heavyweight painters you aspire to be: the Jenny Savilles, the Cecily Browns, and for me Chris Ofili is incredible, his use of color and light,” says Rouy. “And then you’ve got the Freuds and the Bacons. I love the standard of that work; it’s very high, and it keeps me humble and ambitious.”

While he harks back to those masters, Rouy is a very 21st-century artist. Rather than relying on live models for his paintings, he often begins with an image found through a Google search. “We’re saturated with imagery online, and that is the tool,” he says of his relationship with tech. When he’s making a painting, he looks at it through the camera on his phone (“The phone has become a viewfinder,” he explains) and will sometimes photograph it, edit the picture on his computer, and then use that as the reference imagery to complete the work. The results, he says, are completely analog and human, but with a sliver of the uncanny. They contain “the DNA of the fact that there’s a computer involved somewhere, but it doesn’t feel that I’m imitating the computer,” he says.

Rouy grew up in Sittingbourne, Kent, not far from where he lives now. His brother, Alfie, and sister, Elsa, are both also artists. “My dad is a retired hairdresser, and my mum worked in various offices—she does a bit of cleaning and stuff like that.” Rouy writhes when I ask whether he and his siblings are that rarity—working-class artists. “I’m very proud of how we have all managed to do it,” he finally says. “It maybe looks easy from the outside, but there was a lot of work to be able to get to this point.”

As a child, Rouy wasn’t academic but loved painting and drawing. “I felt like art was my only release, so I spent pretty much all my free time making it,” he says. He would often paint in bed, the place to which he often retreats after a big show. “I naturally do work in bed. Sometimes I’m just resting, but other times I’m thinking about or looking at the work.”

Rouy left high school at 16, then went to Camberwell to get his art degree. It was there that he was first encouraged to use found images: “I was into the Dada way of working—also like Jeff Koons—where they appropriate what’s already there and repurpose it.” The attitude of the so-called Young British Artists, who were booming around the time Rouy was born, in 1994, also inspired him. “I loved the YBAs for their punky feel,” he says. “Some of Damien Hirst’s fly paintings, like the black circles [made up of thousands of dead flies]—how can you get any better than that?”

At art college, Rouy started modeling “because it was a bit of cash,” and has since walked for houses including Miu Miu and Saint Laurent. “Now I only do stuff that is linked to the fact that I’m an artist, not a model,” he says. “I enjoy clothes, so there is something fun about modeling, but there can also be something very bland about it.” His personal style is playful and immediately impressive: The day we talk, he’s in a coolly disheveled black hoodie, and his hair, which he likes to change frequently, is short and bleached. “When I’m not seeing anyone, I’m just covered in paint all the time, but if I’m going out I like to feel fresh,” he says.

After university, Rouy took a job cleaning and building the giant Christmas lights that hang in London’s Regent Street every year, while he tried to get started as an artist. “Having eight hours a day doing that and trying to find the energy to do art as well was hard,” he says. After three years, when he was 23, he was offered a show at the London gallery J Hammond Projects, and soon after he met Hannah Barry.

Rouy enjoys the way that being an artist enables him to come into contact with creatives he wouldn’t otherwise encounter. “What’s amazing is that you meet people in different industries that you feel really connected with. There’s a man called Michael Sorkin who’s a German engineer working in 3D printing and aerospace, and I just really love hanging around with him. And then I have a good friend, Nikolaj Schultz, who’s a Danish philosopher and sociologist. We can talk for hours about the world, the environment, what our role is, what is life…all the deep questions.” Rouy also works with Ifill on Tarmac Press, publishing their own books and those of other artists in their circle, including Louie Jenkins, Jack Whitefield, and Alice Dellal. Eyal is another friend, and Rouy has participated in warm-ups with her dance troupe. “It’s incredible when you do it—you can feel the limitations of the body,” he says.

In conversation—as in life—Rouy keeps being drawn back to the corporeal, his primary subject. “There’s something intuitive about looking at other humans,” he says. “The representation of the body is already imprinted in the brain somewhat. You’re working within the tight parameters of the human form, but there are endless possibilities about how that can be approached, and our concept of what the figure is endlessly changes with age and mortality.” Rouy says that as time goes by, he has become more comfortable with his practice, especially with the way it seems to solve all kinds of questions in his mind. “Sometimes you’re making work,” he says, “and the answers come through that.”

Ifill believes that Rouy’s meteoric rise is unlikely to affect the substance of his output. “If you compare it to musicians,” he says, “you have your song, and whether you play it at Wembley Stadium or at the pub, it’s the same song. There’s just more people seeing it, and the work can progress, but ultimately it’s a conversation with yourself.”

Grooming by Elaine Lynskey for NARS Cosmetics at Premier Hair & Make-up; Photo Assistant: Okus Milsom; Fashion Assistant: Taryn Rider.