Remember me
Elsa Rouy’s first institutional solo exhibition opens at MCSW Elektrownia in Radom on 23 January. Titled Just Because, the presentation brings together the artist’s distinctive work on the subject of the nude, alongside several new paintings made specifically for the exhibition.
Rouy (b. 2000; UK) describes her work as “a visual portrayal of abstruse emotions”. The phrasing fits an artist whose semi-biographical practice stays close to the lived body while refusing the comfort of tidy narrative. Her figurative canvases stage intimate scenes where grotesque bodies split and rupture, their separate skins seeping and melting into one another, while bodily fluids leak and intermingle. The figures repeatedly occupy a charged threshold, poised in the uneasy territory between suffering and pleasure. In that tension, Rouy navigates the anxieties that come with having a body, and with knowing it is being read, measured, and judged.
Elsa Rouy. What emerges is not provocation for its own sake, but a sustained inquiry into visibility and control. Rouy’s painting turns the nude into a contemporary art problem again: less ideal form than psychological theatre, less classical pose than a negotiation with power. Her work attempts to explore the dynamics of societal and internal power structures, tracing how external expectations and private feeling collide on the skin.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue issued by the museum, extending the project beyond the gallery walls and situating Rouy’s practice within current debates around figuration, intimacy, and agency in contemporary painting.
Elsa Rouy, Compassion Fatigue, 2025
Rouy’s recent solo shows were at GNYP Gallery Berlin/Antwerp; Patricia Low Contemporary, Venice; Guts Gallery, London and Steve Turner, Los Angeles. She has also taken part in numerous group exhibitions, including at SWCAC, Shenzhen; Eigen+Art, Leipzig; Des Bains, London; Natahalie Karg Gallery, New York; Palazzo Monti, Brescia; Larsen Warner, Stockholm; EIGEN + ART Lab, Berlin; Tuesday to Friday, Valencia; Castor Gallery, London and many more. Rouy graduated from Camberwell College of Art in 2021 and currently lives and works in London.
Elsa Rouy: Just Because opens on the 24th of January, 2026 until the 16th of March, 2026 at MCSW Elektrownia Learn more about Elsa Rouy here.©2026 Elsa Rouy
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