The Body in the Room

The Body in the Room brings together paintings by Nanci Byrne, Katarina Časerman, Emma Cousin, and Ngai Ning Yu, examining the body as a site of negotiation between presence and withdrawal, legibility and concealment. Byrne and Časerman present the body with mythic force, figures caught in intensity, transformation, and excess, filling the frame with an unavoidable presence. Cousin’s figures sit in a more ambiguous space, unmistakably physical yet slightly estranged from themselves, the body made awkward and almost alien within its own skin.

In contrast, Ngai Ning Yu’s interiors shift toward absence. Her rooms, suffused with light and framed by windows, curtains, and stillness, suggest the body as something withdrawn, leaving only traces of habitation: a shadow, a silhouette, a sense of someone just gone or not yet arrived. Together, the works explore the unstable threshold between exposure and invisibility, where the body is never simply present but always becoming visible or slipping away, questioning what it means to be seen and what is lost or revealed in that process.