We are incredibly excited to announce our forthcoming exhibition Soft Serve, a solo presentation of new works by Ross Head. Developed over the past year, Ross Head’s latest body of work transforms the gallery into a space to reflect upon and explore the parallels of desire and hunger. Referencing Patti Smith’s 1978 song ‘Because the Night’ – co-written with Bruce Springsteen - itself an ode to intense longing, connection and love, Head riffs on their urgent lyric: ‘love is a banquet on which we feed’. Through the exhibition, he invites visitors to consider the links between bodily sensation and performance, alongside our own appetites for pleasure.

 

"This body of work continues my obsession with the performative and expressive aspects of desire. Here, I am using paint to create a space where elements of fantasy come into play and these desires can be explored and enacted. These figures engage with the viewer through their gaze sometimes directly and others not. What I’m really interested in is thinking of desire as a bodily sensation and those strong feelings of wanting or needing something or someone. I want to translate that into paint, into the physicality of the material in a gestural and expansive way."

 

Ross Head in conversation with Gemma Rolls-Bentley

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Ross Head was born in 1984 in Shropshire, England. He currently lives and works in London, UK. He received an MA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2024 and was awarded the Zsuzsi Roboz Scholarship, Almacantar Studio Award, UCL East Provost Art Prize and the JM Finn Graduate Artist Award. Recent solo exhibitions include Take Me To The Places That I Love Best, 2024, HSBC HQ. Selected group exhibitions include: Soup, Greatorex Street, London, 2024; Blueprints of Hope, UCL, London, 2023; The Ingram Prize, Cromwell Place, 2023; Introducing, Studio West Gallery, London 2023; Hometown Sessions, EDJI Gallery, Paris, France, 2022; He received the Travel Award for Artists from British School at Athens in 2022 and his work can be found in UCL East Public Art Collection, UK