Ashley Saville presents group exhibition examining beauty, desire, and abjection
Simon Periton, Snatch 6, 2001, fluorescent orange, metallic brown & grey paper 70 x 90 cm © Simon Periton. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.
LONDON.—
Ashley Saville presents La Belle et la Bête, the first group exhibition at 193 Fleet Street. The exhibition takes its title from Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s fairytale of the same name, a text that has bewitched artists, musicians, and filmmakers since its anonymous publication in 1740.
A young woman is trapped in an enchanted castle with a beastly creature. At first she loathes him, but eventually her heart softens. Her declaration of true love breaks the Beast’s curse: he transforms into a handsome prince, and they live happily ever after.
Though rooted in a moralising literary tradition, La Belle et la Bête resists simple binaries of good and evil. Desire and abjection, duty and transgression, ideals and outsiders are not fundamental oppositions; rather, they are intricately imbricated aspects of life and love. Such ambivalence makes for a particularly interesting fairytale, offering rich ground for interpretation.
This exhibition uses the fairytale as a lens through which to consider these ideas. Five artists have been invited to respond to this broad line of inquiry however they wish.
In Erika Trotzig’s sculptural installation, A Haunting… (2026), a pair of large-scale skeletal forms loom in the corner of the gallery. Constructed from Jesmonite-dipped rags held up by reclaimed wooden structures, these towering figures appear on the verge of collapse.
In the floor-mounted sculpture, Our Idea of the Future is Becoming Misaligned (2026), two slug-like creatures lurk low, one lying prone on a wooden pallet and the other bulging out of a small wooden frame. Their hollow forms are open on one side, revealing pools of pink plaster inside their mouth-like cavities.
Finally, a selection of small wall-mounted sculptures from the artist’s Dysfunctional Family series (2026) are presented as miniature monsters. Like the Beast, Trotzig’s forms exist in a state of duality. They are at once threatening and endearing.
Tess Tomassini’s painting, Tongue-Tied (2026), depicts two mouths connected by a shared tongue. Expressive and irreverent in its hot-pink palette, the painting captures the complex eroticism of the fairytale’s narrative. Here, desire and abjection are inseparable forces.
Jason Shulman’s Kong with Ann Darrow (2019) and Blazing Ann Darrow (2026) are abraded film stills from King Kong (1933). Dynamic in their scarified surfaces, Ann Darrow’s blazing silhouette dominates both compositions.
King Kong is a modern retelling of La Belle et La Bête. However, unlike in the fairytale, Kong’s romantic obsession proves fatal. This point is emphasised by the film’s concluding line, “It was beauty killed the beast.”
Shulman’s Untitled (1968) is a found photograph of the six-year-old artist at Battersea Funfair. A person in a bear costume stands beside the child. With snarling jaws, the bear places one hand on its heart and the other in the child’s. An uncomfortable tension pervades the image.
Simon Periton’s paper cut-outs evoke a fairytale forest landscape. In Snatch 6 (1999), two fluorescent orange crows are caught in a tangle of brambles. In Utopia (2000), a spider catches a butterfly in its fluorescent yellow web. These are intricate, gothic images of entrapment.
Chantal Goulder’s Untitled (Mannequin) (2026) is a mixed-media print on rice paper. It is a recreation of an anonymous 1970s photograph found by the artist. The image depicts a female mannequin—complete with false eyelashes, a permed wig and a florid gown—standing embowered in roses.
The rose is a complex motif in La Belle et La Bête. Positioned antithetically to material desire, it represents transcendent beauty.
A screening of Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête will take place at Reference Point on 27 July, in collaboration with Drawing From Film.
