Stuart Shave Modern Art is pleased to present Dutch artist Lara Schnitger in her first solo show in the UK.

Playing with cultural stereotypes Schnitger’s sculptures and fabric covered drawings skew and question how we associate desire and visual symbolism with gender.

Panels of cloth with previous lives, such as tights, pyjama cottons, tourist tshirts, printed upholstery fabrics, fine lace or fur pelts, Schnitger’s fabrics are sewn, buttoned or laced together. The handmade, domestic feel of the cloth’s surfaces begin to take on a skin-like character, transforming the sculptures into androgynous beings; their specific gender often deliberately confused with the inclusion of typically feminine and masculine fabrics and patterns. Sheer and opaque sections of fabric are stretched over the sculptures’ internal wooden architecture, hiding and revealing their inner structure; suggesting these ambiguous figures in a perpetual state of seductive undress.

Acknowledging her work’s palpable, historical feminist underpinning, Schnitger chooses to utilise such precedents to take on contemporary themes of desire. The artist’s own experience as a new mother informs her openness to the body and the taboos surrounding pregnancy and child-birth. Schnitger talks about the subject with a refreshingly graphic quality that enjoys this physical, natural event with a palette of honest, simplified forms. Overarching the show is a sense of movement, of thrusting and of penetration. Schnitger deliberately moves away from the specificity of gendered approaches to sexuality, choosing instead to work with ‘the sensibility of sexuality’1; it’s sensations and actions and not the standardized imagery that has come to represent it.

Schnitger’s previous works have more overtly referenced the spoken language of desire by stencilling dialogue from adult films directly on to the fabric of her sculptures. In amplifying smutty dialogues and sexual demands, Schnitger’s text works broke down stereotypes of eroticism to the absurd. Within Schnitger’s most recent works shown here at the gallery, form and visual symbolism speak louder and more directly about the contradictory dialectic inherent in the contemporary voice of gendered desire.