Brooke Benington is pleased to announce At Least Buy Me Dinner First, a solo exhibition by Katie Tomlinson that brings together a collection of new paintings exploring power and consent within our intimate relationships. Presented through a heat-haze of memory, sun-saturated seaside summers and adolescent indiscretions, these paintings depict moments of sexual, physical, and emotional intimacy shared with lovers, friends, family and strangers.
Woven through Tomlinson's paintings are layers of meaning and cultural and art historical references. They invite and encourage multiple readings acknowledging the nuance in the discussions she initiates. As a viewer we flit between enjoyment, reassured by their nostalgic familiarity, bathing in their warm glow, and feeling disquieted by an undercurrent of darkness that flows through them.
At Least Buy Me Dinner First positions the viewer as a voyeur, glimpsing private moments and intimate acts, passing judgement on a first impression that we are then called upon to reconsider. Within Tomlinson’s paintings, there is a particular focus on power structures, the patriarchy, gender binaries, and exchange within relationships - the push and pull of becoming a strong and healthy unit without tipping into co-dependency. This is further expressed through the leitmotif of food and eating that runs through the exhibition; hunger, lust, desire, greed, gluttony, sustenance and abstinence, nurture and nutrition, compulsion and consent. The characters in the paintings are often found eating, eating off one another or preparing various foods. And if they are not consuming food, they are aggressively kissing and consuming one another.
The narratives played out in the exhibition consider the politicisation of intimacy and how we adhere to, challenge and, at times, lust after these socially devised power constructs. As Amia Srinivasan identifies, "sex isn’t a sandwich, and it isn’t really like anything else either. There is nothing else so riven with politics and yet so inviolably personal".
