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Dive into these exhibitions focusing on our love of water
It’s a hot day in Hammersmith, all burning tarmac and brittle grass. But in Tarka Kings’ studio, located on a pontoon on the Thames, a mood of cool serenity presides. The artist’s workspace rocks gently beneath our feet, its windows revealing an ever-changing view of the river. Rowers speed back and forth while swans drift in slow, haughty circles.
It’s a fitting location to preview Kings’ new body of work, showing at Offer Waterman from late September. Mornings at the Lido is a tightly focused set of drawings, all featuring the same woman getting changed at the Serpentine. In some of the images she is readying herself for the swim ahead. In others, she is towelling off or pulling on her socks.
Kings has been swimming at the lido in Hyde Park most mornings for five years, through winter frosts and scorching summers. “It’s like starting each day anew,” says the London-born artist. “You’ve clicked into something deeper, more mysterious. You get in touch with being in your body.” But when she started thinking about how to depict her experience, she encountered a problem. How do you capture the feeling of swimming? From a first-person perspective, the eyeline is mainly ducks and water. Zoom out to watch from the sidelines and it’s all bobbing heads and murky, refracted limbs.
Kings decided to focus instead on the “strange and sacred” effects of bathing via the transitional – shedding clothes, entering the water and returning post-immersion. There’s “a literal changing and a metaphorical changing,” she says. The resulting portraits, featuring one of her son’s friends, are quietly intimate. Kings’ pencil lingers over the textures of towels and the blue-black sheen of dripping hair. She gets closer to the mundane magic of the experience: sometimes transformative, sometimes contemplative, sometimes an unremarkable part of the day. They recall Iris Murdoch’s observation that “swimming, like dying, seems to solve all problems: and you remain alive”.
Swimming has always been a draw for artists, from Seurat’s bathers and Matisse’s blue cutouts to David Hockney’s famous pool paintings, including A Bigger Splash (1967). This year, a striking number of exhibitions focus on our relationship with water.
Some, like Kings’, are interested in swimming as a communal part of life: Kate Gottgens’ pale figures splash around in lakes and lounge by the coast in The Blue of Distance, currently at Huxley-Parlour; in the recent Noah Davis show at the Barbican, the soles of a diver’s feet flash as he jumps into a pool full of other swimmers (all part of the imagined community Davis peopled in his art). When the Museum of West African Art opens in Benin City in Nigeria in November, one of the inaugural shows will include Modupeola Fadugba, who explores swimming as a skill. Her layered paintings span lifeguards and swimmers in Accra, Abuja, Lagos, Dakar and Philadelphia, and the Harlem Honeys and Bears, an all-Black senior synchronised swimming team.
Elsewhere, swimming has been portrayed as a kind of baptism, with artists teasing out its quasi-spiritual qualities. American artist Roni Horn, known for her photographs exploring gender, identity and androgyny, is opening Water, Water On the Wall, You’re the Fairest of Them All at MCA Denver from mid-September.
Photographer Marvel Harris uses the subject to explore how it felt to move through a public space before and after his gender transition. In his self-portrait First Swim After Rebirth, currently on show in the V&A’s Design and Disability exhibition, we see Harris grinning, fresh from the sea, having swum for the first time after undergoing top surgery. “I don’t remember smiling like that before,” he says. “I felt uncomfortable in my own body going through my transition. That moment [was] the first time that I could truly be me.”
In other places, bathing is a way of exploring lifestyle. The Design Museum’s Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style, on until 17 August, looks at how the design of swimming, from pool architecture to bikinis, has evolved from the 1920s to the present day.
Evie O’Connor is a contemporary painter who is especially attentive to the underlying social currents of swimming. Her paintings are at once seductive and eerie, all saturated blues and striped sun umbrellas. The scenes are often devoid of people. “I solely focused on private pools, as a space to be seen, a backdrop to life, rather than a space to indulge in,” she explains. “I thought about how Kim Kardashian said she’d lived in a new house for two years and never stepped foot in her pool.” In this respect, her work is the antithesis of someone like Leon Kossoff’s, who repeatedly painted the same children’s swimming pool in Willesden in the early 1970s. The resulting images are jubilant: the pool not a space of separation but collective enjoyment, the water so alive that one can easily imagine the shrieks.
