21 - 26 October 2025
For Paris Internationale 2025 the gallery presents a solo exhibition by Milly Thompson (1962–2022). It draws together works from three different series addressing the correlation between commodity, pleasure, sensuality and the historical depiction of the female body. These concerns are variously channelled by Thompson through invocations of classical sculpture, the paintings of Francis Picabia and Sogetsu, a form of Japanese flower arranging.
"There’s something slutty about making paintings", Thompson once said, "because they are the easiest ‘sell’“. A series of paintings made 2010-13 pay ironic tribute to Francis Picabia, the maverick ex-Dadaist whose varied oeuvre included a series of painted female nudes from the 1940s that were shocking in their day. Thompson salutes Picabia’s irreverence while significantly confounding his lascivious male gaze. The women in these paintings luxuriate and take pleasure in saturated colours, basking in Thompson’s brazen appropriation.
The Desert Sirens (2013) is a series of anonymous neo-classical goddesses taking the form of cartoonishly perfect sculptural torsos draped in polyester fabric. Unabashedly drawing the viewer's attention to pairs of pneumatic breasts, these headless figures speak both to the commodification of the female form and the streamlining of the commodified art object.
Thompson’s later paintings deploy the art of Sogetsu, a style of Ikebana (Japanese flower arranging), as a lens through which to view the pressures on women to achieve bodily perfection. Sogestu is a branch of Ikebana where any kind of object can be brought into play: a roll of barbed wire, a rose, a bunch of dead leaves. It is up to the aesthetic awareness of the Sogestu arranger to assemble the materials, choose their most beautiful aspects, order them and endow them with a value transcending that which they had in nature. Thompson's playful détournements of Sogestu arrangements are painted on bed linen, while the traditional staging of ideal form is disrupted by a comic incursion of contemporary emojis. Some were invented by Thompson and invoke devilish, imperfect female characters. These ludic interventions kick back at the persistence of conventional impositions on women.
I think, as a female artist, if there’s something you are passionate about, then you have to be really passionate about it. You have to take it and really stick it to them. It’s much easier for blokes to sit around schlonging away with their cocks out, talking about their interesting abstract or figurative art, or whatever they’re doing. It’s much easier to be that person because there’s a history there to back them up, whereas we, as female painters, are creating our history as we go.
Milly Thompson
This presentation follows a critically acclaimed solo exhibition at Goldsmiths CCA in London earlier this year which will travel to The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in March 2026.
Milly Thompson was a member of the artists' collective BANK from 1994 to 2003, solo and group exhibitions included Tate Modern, ICA , London and Whitechapel Gallery and most recently a presentation of Bank’s Fax-Baks at Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2022. Her solo work has been featured in various exhibitions including at Peer UK, Focal Point Gallery and South London Gallery. She was a six-time recipient of the Goldsmiths Research Award, a two-time winner of the Arts Council of England's Individual Artist Award and the Elephant Trust Award, and was also presented with the British School at Rome's Sargant Award and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award. BANK’s work is held in various public collections including TATE, British Council, MOMA NY and Printed Matter NY. Thompson’s solo work is in the collections of the Government Art Collection, British Library, Printed Matter NY and Focal Point Gallery.
The publication VUOTO by Alison Jones and Milly Thompson is currently included in the exhibition TURNING PAGES: Artists’ Books of the Present at MAK Museum, Vienna.
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