Co-curated by Jonathan Armour LG and Jamie Gallagher.
Five artists dissecting and reconstructing the human form beyond the fractured landscape of contemporary identity politics.
Post Woke Body Shop
03 – 15 June
Great Pulteney Street Gallery
36 Great Pulteney Street, Soho, London W1F 9NS
Private View: Tues 3 June 5.30-8.30pm RSVP here
Post Woke Body Shop brings together five contemporary painters exploring the human figure in an age of shifting identities, cultural tension, and visual noise. At a time when the body is so often politicised, aestheticised, or flattened into symbol, these works reclaim it as something messier, more physical—capable of being broken down, repaired, and reimagined.
Moving beyond the familiar narratives, the exhibition offers a visceral, open-ended approach to the body. The artists—Jonathan Armour, Jamie Gallagher, Ilya Shkipin, Mani Vertigo, and David Deweerdt—engage with the figure not as a fixed form, but as something in flux: painted bodies that flicker between presence and absence, intimacy and abstraction, myth and memory.
As curator and exhibiting artist Jamie Gallagher explains:
“We wanted to create a space where the body could be approached without a preloaded script—beyond the hashtags, beyond the rhetoric. Paint allows for a kind of raw engagement that resists easy categorisation. This show is about returning to the figure as something resilient, vulnerable, and full of potential.”
Curated by Gallagher and Armour, the team behind HEAD: Beyond the Face, Post Woke Body Shop continues their ongoing interest in the body as a site of experimentation and reinvention—both politically and materially.
