MICHAEL HILSMAN – MAN ON BED
2022-02-28“Man On Bed” the work from which this exhibition takes its name, is deceptively flat in both form and title. Like an analyst’s couch, the titular lounger is a device for day-dreaming. Its pink upholstery is a ground upon which Hilsman has rendered – with unsettling detail – a man’s feet protruding from beneath a blanket. Light glints off each nail and the second toe on the left foot bends at the tip, revealing a broken phalanx. Bony and elongated with sallow skin, these alien appendages are a metonym of modern man’s estrangement from his own body, a corpus increasingly objectified and pathologized. They illustrate what Hilsman describes as his effort to “foreground the physical in order to highlight the unseen.”
Opposite – Figure With Flowers And Spoon, 2021
Exhibition runs through to April 23rd, 2022
Almine Rech
18 avenue Matignon
75008 Paris
France
