Sarah Muirhead gets physical at Leyden gallery with Bonded exhibition

Self-restraint by Sarah Muirhead. Copyright Sarah Muirhead

The body is the focus of emerging artist Sarah Muirhead’s relaunch show at Leyden Gallery this month.

Entitled Bonded, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s fascination with the physicality of the body and its capacity for pleasure, pain and expression.

Dancers, acrobats and tattooed torsos are among Muirhead’s subjects; characters in provocative poses who seem to have lived their lives on the fringes of the mainstream.

The detail in Muirhead’s work verges on photographic realism, though with a colour palette more akin to German expressionism.
Bonded will be the Edinburgh-based artist’s first large-scale show following a two-year hiatus from the art scene.

After graduating from the Edinburgh School of Art in 2009, Muirhead was tipped for great things, and for her ‘re-launch’ show, the Leyden Gallery will be showing her figurative art work alongside a lithographic print by the internationally renowned Portuguese artist Paula Rego, as well as five works on paper by the Argentine surrealist painter Leonor Fini.

Bonded: Sarah Muirhead + Paula Rego & Leonor Fini is at Leyden Gallery, 9/9a Leyden Street,E1 7LE until 27 June
leydengallery.com

The Performer’s Apparition by Sarah Muirhead. Copyright Sarah Muirhead

Entanglement by Sarah Muirhead. Copyright Sarah Muirhead