An array of works by artists including Degas, Rubens, Jenny Saville, and Francis Bacon that explore flesh in all its fulsomeness, flabbiness, and floridness is currently occupying the York Art Gallery, on display until March 19, 2017.In “Flesh,” the gallery focuses on how artists have portrayed bodies — both human and animal — over the last 600 years through 60 works. It encompasses everything from a 14th-century altarpiece that makes a special effort to realistically show the emaciated body of Christ as he is taken down from the cross, to contemporary works like Jonathan Yeo’s painting of a facelift in process, or one of Sarah Lucas’ “NUD” series, in which she makes twisting forms out of fleshy materials.Rather than showing the works chronologically, however, they are placed in dialogue which each other in five themed rooms. In one, for example, Berlinde De Bruyckere’s disturbingly lifelike animal carcass “Romeu (My Deer),” 2011, stands on a slab with its sliced-open stomach facing Frans Snyders'“A Game Stall,” 1630, the two works together raising issues about meat consumption and the implicit glorification of painting a subject.There is also room for real flesh alongside artistic depictions thereof, from the hyper-Romantic Rubens work to the hyperrealist one by Ron Mueck of a black youth displaying a wound on his side. Katarzyna Mirczak’s “The Special Signs” series shows formaldehyde-preserved slices of skin featuring tattoos collected in the prisons of 19th century Krakow.Visitors can also expect to see pieces by Adriana Varejao, Edgar Degas, Leon Kossoff, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Jean-Baptiste Chardin, The Boyle Family, Bruce Nauman, John Coplans, Jo Spence, William Etty, Auguste Rodin, Peter Paul Rubens, and Steve McQueen.“Flesh” runs through March 19, 2017 at York Art Gallery.
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