Commanding in scale yet elusive in presence, Ser Serpas’ Untitled from 2022 inhabits the liminal space between figuration and abstraction. Executed with sweeping, gestural brushstrokes and a vivid chromatic vocabulary, the work conjures an anonymous figure whose very form is defined by contradiction. The torso appears to materialise only to dissolve back into a delicate mauve ground, creating an image that feels at once intimate in its immediacy and defiant in its refusal of recognisable identity. Rendered in a palette of soft flesh tones animated by luminous yellows, flashes of blue, and passages of black, Serpas imbues the figure with a palpable sense of depth and vitality. Created in the years preceding the artist’s gender transition, Untitled acquires an added resonance through its treatment of the body. The distended limbs recall the canonical imagery of the Venus Pudica, whose self-protective gesture paradoxically accentuates the very zones it seeks to conceal. Here, Serpas simultaneously invokes and unsettles the conventions of bodily representation, aligning her work with a longer history of figurative art while reorienting it towards questions of identity and visibility.

Serpas’ imagery draws upon a heterogeneous range of sources, combining material from her personal photographic archive – portraits of herself, friends, and former partners – with appropriated images of cosmetic surgery patients encountered on online forums. This interweaving of the personal and the mediated reflects the artist’s own period of transition and shifting self-perception, foregrounding the body as a site of both vulnerability and transformation. The recurring chromatic motifs in her practice, particularly the sustained interplay of yellows and blues, evoke the temporality of bruising: a painterly metaphor for the body’s capacity to heal, regenerate, and assume new forms. In this sense, metamorphosis is not simply thematised but enacted within the work’s material and conceptual processes.

Historical and cultural references throughout art history enrich Untitled: the torso’s simultaneous emphasis and elision recalls the fragmented statuary of classical antiquity, particularly depictions of Aphrodite, while the protective arm gesture resonates with Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Meanwhile, the elongated, attenuated limbs conjure the dreamlike distortions of Surrealism, recalling René Magritte’s interrogation of bodily symbolism. In synthesising these diverse references, Serpas situates her practice within a broader lineage of artists who have interrogated the body’s mutable capacity to bear cultural and psychological projection. Within this space of indeterminacy, Serpas probes the unstable intersections of corporeality, perception, and gendered identity, situating the body as both subject and site of contestation.

The present work operates in sustained dialogue with Serpas’ wider artistic practice, which is perhaps best known for its assemblages of found and readymade materials. Across both her sculptural installations and her paintings, Serpas persistently negotiates the interstices of the personal and the public, transforming fragments of lived experience into resonant forms that interrogate memory and identity. Her recent turn to painting has been distinguished by an incisive engagement with the human figure, approached not as a stable category but as a mutable site of shifting identities and projections. The present work’s oscillation between intimacy and anonymity – at once evoking corporeal presence and resisting recognisable portraiture - compels sustained reflection, situating the painting as a pivotal marker within her continually evolving oeuvre. Reflecting this growing significance, Serpas has been the subject of major institutional solo exhibitions, including presentations at the Kunsthalle Basel and the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, affirming her position as one of the most vital voices within contemporary practice.