Image: Rhodes, London
RHODES Contemporary Art will present ‘Chorus’, a group exhibition bringing together six painters whose work examines the human body and its place in 21st-century art. The exhibition will run from 3 to 26 September 2026 at the gallery’s premises at 65 Great Portland Street, London, with an opening reception scheduled for 10 September from 6 to 8pm.
The exhibition takes its title from the idea of multiple voices brought together while remaining distinct. Across the works, bodies are repeated, fragmented, distorted, obscured and reimagined. RHODES frames these approaches through themes including transience, overwhelm, anonymity, humour, isolation, collective belonging and the pressures of modern life.
‘Chorus’ places the figure in dialogue with the history of figurative painting while moving beyond conventional portraiture. The exhibition’s description presents the body as both a singular and collective entity, with anonymised and universal forms used to consider memory, visual culture and social experience. Selected works listed by the gallery include Ewa Czwartos’s ‘I am coming home’ (2026), Yoora Lee’s ‘Still Crossing’ (2026), Jack Penny’s ‘Formalities’ (2026), Julia Moon’s ‘Woman on a Chair’ (2026) and Marina Priyomova’s ‘Escaping the Past’ (2026).
The six artists approach these concerns through markedly different pictorial languages. Eleanor Johnson’s fluid, layered figures explore instability, excess and shifting flesh, with earlier marks remaining visible beneath later passages. Czwartos revisits inherited historical imagery and repeated female forms to examine femininity, cultural memory and continuing ideals of beauty. Penny’s large-scale scenes of city life, often featuring uniformed waiters, use humour and social observation to explore ritual, identity and the tension between individuality and collective dress.
Lee’s paintings draw on found imagery from television, film and the internet, reconstructing scenes between recollection and fiction. Her layered, wavering brushwork evokes analogue-video distortion and reflects an interest in the relationship between memory, reality and mediated images. Priyomova works with burlap, oil and plaster, building and disrupting faceless figures whose emergence and disappearance suggest the instability of memory and the gradual erasure of individual identity.
Moon’s paintings investigate the shifting boundaries between body, object and space. Her blurred images of nude figures treat recognisable form as something transitional, while the relationship between figure and ground remains unsettled. The gallery’s presentation of ‘Chorus’ brings these six approaches together in a consideration of how bodies are shaped by memory, history, technology and contemporary social pressures. RHODES Contemporary Art lists its regular hours as Tuesday to Friday, 11am to 6pm, and Saturday, noon to 6pm; the gallery is closed on Sundays and public holidays, with visits also available by appointment.
