Monya Rowe Gallery is excited to announce the summer group exhibition titled The Bathroom Show featuring Polina Barskaya, Larissa Bates, Cindy Bernhard, Anne Buckwalter, Aaron Feltman, Aubrey Levinthal, Erin Milez, Emily Marie Miller, Justin Liam O’Brien, Bryan Rogers, Anastasiya Tarasenko, Natalie Terenzini and Brea Weinreb.
Last year the gallery mounted a summer exhibition titled The Bedroom Show, which explored the historical significance of the bedroom throughout art history. Continuing the theme of ubiquitous subjects in the art canon, this year’s summer exhibition is an ode to the humble bathroom which has played a substantial role throughout art history and has taken on its’ own singular significance. Some of the most iconic works of art are related to or situated in a bathroom. In the late 1800’s Degas created a series of pastel drawings of women drying off after a bath. Also in the late 1800’s, Mary Cassatt depicted a series titled The Child’s Bath. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp changed the course of art history with his seminal ready-made, Fountain, which suggested that the viewer activates an artwork, not the artist. In the 1920’s Pierre Bonnard showed his wife in a series of tomb-like bathtub paintings. In the 70’s Sylvia Sleigh’s, The Turkish Bath, depicted a group of nude men lounging around together. Although not specifically set in a bathroom, the painting confronted the trope of men painting nude women; Sleigh’s Female Gaze contributed to reversing the privilege of the Male Gaze.
In the late 80’s Joan Semmel addressed the aging process with The Locker Series which features groups of middle-aged women engaged in bathroom rituals. In the early 90’s Hugh Steers depicted paintings of HIV sufferers being cared for by loved ones in bathrooms. Outside of the visual arts, bathrooms also capture our attention in Film. Drug overdoses, sex, transformation, cruising, even murder are common bathroom tableaus. In Body Heat (1981), a banal scene of William Hurt exiting a graffiti-clad pale green tiled public bathroom is charged by a young blonde Adonis (presumably a hustler) discreetly smoking a cigarette in the corner. There are too many bathroom scenes in movies to enumerate in this small text, but one would be remiss not to mention the shower scene in Psycho (1960), which produced one of the most legendary moments in film.