Hung Drawn and Quartered

Coups Contemporary is pleased to present Hung Drawn and Quartered, a solo exhibition by Irene Pouliassi. The exhibition marks the artist’s first solo presentation at the gallery after a longstanding curatorial partnership. From decked in lines of laundry across narrow alleyways of Italy and Corfu to the execution methods reserved for enemies of the state, Hung Drawn and Quartered, an array of ghostly garments, slips, shirts, blouses, trousers and coats, crumpled and imprinted with creases from days, months or decades of being folded away, adorned with hair, teeth and bones serving as artefacts of domestic situations. Woven guns, the denotative entities whose associations trigger themes such as protection, danger, safety, identity, gender, class, erotics, oppression, or revulsion. Suspended, they take on a spectral guise that reflects on societal tribalistic manifestations as continuing to provide an autopsy on the monstrous feminine. As garments outlive their owner, their presence alludes to irrevocable absence, an insignia beyond mortal flesh, signalling our jobs, our tastes, and the ways we want to be perceived by the world. However, in death, they become tactile reminders of what once was, made to fit bodies that can no longer fill them. An array reminiscent of an abattoir that critically reimagines environments and characters that serve as allegorical social taxidermy, the installation serves as an autopsy that spans themes of transformation, subjugation, identity pain and intersectionality. Pouliassi writes: ‘I want to keep the archetypal symbolism beyond the survival of clothing as mortal flesh. Weaved guns, military insignia and initials create a narrative while alluding to my inner thoughts of violence and nonconformism. Butcher my sublime made-up characters/cut-up garments, hanging contorted, lumpen bodies with exposed seams like scars, engulfing the crossings and divergences of this psycho-affective unspoken warfare. Mementoes of previous selves, hanging freely or stuffed and sewn closed to suggest a human form, hanging as emblems of violence, intimacy and methodical repair by reviving the discarded and remould neo-punk au courant fetishes.’