John Hodgkinson: Bath House

Galerie Pepe is pleased to present Bath House an exhibition by artist John Hodgkinson (UK, b. 1989). July 25th – September 19th, 2026.

Bath House takes as its point of departure the architecture of the 19th-century German bathhouse, a site historically associated with the Lebensreform movement and its advocacy of Freikörperkultur (“free body culture”). Rather than engaging this history through an anthropological lens, the bathhouse functions as a conceptual framework through which broader questions of embodiment, perception, and projection can be explored. The paintings intentionally exclude the human figure, positioning them as “free body” paintings in both a literal and metaphorical sense. By withholding figures, the works resist narrative closure and instead invite viewers to project themselves into the spaces, heightening their awareness of their own embodied presence. Rendered at an approximately one-to-one scale and employing subtle shifts in perspective across the series, the paintings generate an immersive yet disorienting experience that situates the viewer within, rather than outside, the architectural environment.

Formally, Hodgkinson’s paintings are structured through a series of productive contradictions.  Architectural elements—including massage tables suggestive of morgue slabs, platforms oscillating between utilitarian function and theatrical staging, and archways that evoke portals without offering passage—occupy an ambiguous symbolic register. Likewise, environments associated with heat, steam, and corporeal sensation are depicted through compositions that are visually austere, while thick, tactile brushwork introduces a material sense of creamy moisture and physicality. The works test the threshold at which legible architectural space dissolves producing a charged and eerie sense of absence and perceptual instability. The tension between rigid neoclassical forms and their warped perspectives creates a sustained experience of spatial and psychological disorientation.