I sing the body electric presents works by contemporary painters that deal with the human body. Walt Whitman’s poem, an ode to the human physique from which the exhibition title is borrowed, may sound unusually emphatic from today’s perspective. When it appeared in Leaves of grass in 1855, however, it polarised the public. Its language was perceived as sexualised, and its veiled criticism of slavery was understood by some as just that. At that time, not even the trams were electric; they were still pulled by horses. In the mid-19th century, when electromagnetism had only just been discovered, the term had not yet found its way into everyday language and was familiar only to an intellectual and scientific avant-garde.

The human body has preoccupied artists for millennia. Its representation in writing, language and visual art reflects social and cultural discourses. This exhibition also shows how different artistic approaches to this ancient topos can be.

It can be suggested in a cryptic way, as in Cecily Brown’s The call of the flesh, or deliberately misled by the title alone. As a viewer, it is difficult to discover anything physical in the all-over structure of the image, which suggests plants, stones, perhaps water. Only a few red-flesh-coloured details could hint at physicality. And yet, especially when one knows the title, the visual experience of the image can evoke physical sensations, perhaps even desire, suggesting lasciviousness. Brown commands an aesthetic that breaks from the structures of narrative – figuration versus abstraction, landscape versus body – to achieve an extraordinary visual and thematic fluidity.

Ella Kruglyanskaya’s odalisques, on the other hand, are tropes in which the painter shows both political and conceptual interest and which she ironically questions. They offer a rewarding aesthetic object of research for an artist who continuously examines and reveals the conditions of her medium and its history, whose ‘made-ness’ – as Emily LaBarge puts it – is always part of her paintings. LaBarge continues: “Odalisque on pillow (2024) shows us her cold shoulder, almost her entire back, as she reaches for her mandolin, but in reality her body is a field of magenta lines, as if her physicality were resisting itself and wishing to become a completely different kind of painting, freed from realism, background and foreground. Odalisque in blue (2024) is just that, another woman, another mandolin, this time sparsely sketched in a flat atmosphere of bright Klein blue, her form solidified in places by a gossamer scarf, with coloured shapes like Matisse paper cut-outs floating in the blue ether around her. The only solid element in this image, which reminds us of its artificiality through a colour calibration table at the top, is a lemon. Solid in the sense that it casts a shadow, which means that it is part of a kind of foreground and background from which the woman, with her winding gaze and flat form, is exempt.”

Maja Ruznic’s bodies are translucent beings. Traumatised figures who seem unable to trust their own physicality. Mama/Weigh shows figures who, according to the artist, represent four generations of women in her family. The letters are composed of the initials of these women and at the same time form the word Mama. Maja Ruznic was born in Bosnia and fled with her family from war and genocide. After four years in Austrian refugee shelters, the artist emigrated to the USA with her mother and her Austrian-born sister. The weight of the past has bent their bodies, which may be moving, but whose cells seem to bear the tragic mark of genocide and homelessness.

“Through Tobias Spichtig’s brush, bodies, faces, flowers or mountains never quite emerge from their flat surfaces. His painterly approach eliminates depth and volume, capturing people and objects in hard lines and ensuring that the respective image motif freezes into a strange, sickly standstill. They are closer to the works of the reviled French existentialist painter Bernard Buffet – who was revered in the 1950s and later fell into disgrace – than to many other celebrated contemporary paintings. One might ask whether all these paintings, whether by Buffet or Spichtig, are simply bad painting. Spichtig constantly questions what is considered interesting or successful in art and stubbornly tries to avoid the pitfalls of artistic convention and the consensus of good taste. The result plays with a certain form of amateurism and reminds us that being an ‘amateur’ means loving something. But through his research into painting techniques and art history and his attempts to capture a person or mountain in paint, it becomes clear that Spichtig loves painting,” writes Elena Filipovic in her text on Spichtig’s solo exhibition, which she curated at the Kunsthalle Basel last year.

Sarah Lucas stages the body in a critical and at the same time humorous, sexually charged manner. Her sculptures are visual puns in which the body is not concealed but exposed in a grotesquely exaggerated form. In the figures made of nylon stockings, the Bunnies, we encounter deformed bodies draped over chairs, whose overstretched limbs and breasts render the topos of reclining nudes absurd. Between critical, revealing presence and comical vulnerability, it becomes clear how deeply objectification and gender roles are inscribed in our perception. Lucas later transfers the fragile fabric sculptures into bronze or resin, whereby the softness and transience of the bodies gives way to heaviness and permanence. Zen lovesong (2022) unfolds its effect in this field of tension as a sculpture that uses exaggerated colourfulness and artificial smoothness to reveal/negotiate the ambivalence of body, desire and materiality.