Milly Thompson’s sun-drenched, defiant oeuvre celebrates middle-aged desire, lampoons luxury culture, and wields paint like a manifesto—proving art’s power to revel in glorious imperfection.
This exhibition celebrates the bold, irreverent work of British artist Milly Thompson (1964–2022), presenting her paintings, sculptures, videos, and writings from 2010 onwards. A founding member of the influential BANK collective before forging her own path, Thompson developed a practice that skewered luxury culture’s grip on women while exalting the middle-aged female body as a site of desire and power.
Her work deploys irony and sensuality in equal measure, channeling the female gaze to reclaim narratives of glamour, aging, and pleasure. Sunbaked canvases like Hunter watching the beach (2016) and La Vergne in the afternoon (2017) subvert art history’s eroticized nude, replacing youthful idealism with radiant, unapologetic maturity. Later pieces such as Temple Creation (2020) and Scuba Sauvage Azure Bleu (2021) explode into fresh visual languages—ink washes, emoji codes, lyrical abstraction—capturing the female body’s push against mediated beauty standards.
The show also highlights Thompson’s graphic works, including collaborations with Alison Jones like VUOTO (2012), a razor-sharp parody of Vogue. Artist books, manifestos (I Choose Painting, 2016), and selections from her final project The Moon, the Sea & the Matriarch (Timespan, 2019) reveal an artist who wielded humor and fury to carve space for reinvention.
“Art is a place to experiment, make mistakes and understand failure,” Thompson declared. Her legacy? A riotous, genre-defying oeuvre that laughs in the face of perfection.