George Rouy Makes a Bigger Splash

George Rouy Makes a Bigger Splash The British “It” boy edging the art world debuts on the megagallery main stage. Photo: Kingsley Ifill The youngest male painter represented by Hauser & Wirth is a tanned, bleach-blond 32-year-old with a foxlike gaze: alert, then warmly conspiratorial. When I meet George Rouy at Bar Oliver near Chinatown on a Thursday in late August, he is a few days away from installing his debut at the gallery, titled “Reprise,” the result of a steady climb he has carefully managed from Kent, England, where he was born and still lives. Rouy — (pronounced ROO-ee) — wears red athletic pants; a T-shirt printed with the cover of an EP by his girlfriend, the Peruvian model and singer Daniela Lalita; and an oversize vintage Armani leather jacket that drapes from his slender frame. He has a vaguely punk flair with Billy Idol hair, and his rakish, off-kilter looks have made him catnip to fashion art directors — he has walked the Miu Miu runway and posed for Juergen Teller and Hedi Slimane. His image suggests an instinct for how a certain can’t-have-it distance is a condition of cool and bankability. By now, the path of the “It”-boy painter is familiar enough to give everyone pause. Rouy acknowledges as much. There is the brief early period in obscurity, some chance breakthrough, a surge of buying interest, then delirium in the secondary market, institutional recognition, and a waiting list for works in the six-figure (and, if all goes right, seven-figure) range. Following the involvement of a megagallery, the story usually gets interesting: Was it all a pump and dump quietly orchestrated to vampirize young talent and bilk the undiscerning collector? Or is there some staying power, a “there” there, that allows the young painter to endure after the clamor has died down? Rouy, whose paintings have sold for six figures at auction, is keenly aware he has had a meteoric few years, with buzzy shows in London and Los Angeles, and is entering a new stage of his career. “I’m not naïve,” he says. “I’m ready for it. I want to do it now while my body has the energy for it.” A few days later, Rouy is at Hauser & Wirth’s pristine, skylit fifth-floor gallery. Behind him, several of the eight paintings that constitute the show lean against the walls, already in position. A team of art installers waits for his instructions to affix them. It’s a little over a week until the opening, and he seems uncharacteristically nervous. This is the first time he is seeing the works in situ, and the gallery, he adds, hasn’t signed off on the placement. Since graduating from Camberwell College of Arts a little over a decade ago, Rouy has had two solo exhibitions at smaller New York venues — Anna Zorina in 2018 and Nicola Vassell in 2023 — but the stakes here are higher. The canvases we see, which Rouy began in January, depict groups of nude figures with glitched-out, smudged faces. There are black scrawls that follow the arc of an arm in motion, a style of mark-making that recalls Cy Twombly. The late artist’s work has been on Rouy’s mind since a project commissioned by the Vatican brought him to Rome, which was a second home to Twombly. To my eye, Rouy’s strategy of disfigurement also owes a debt to Francis Bacon, except a portrait by that artist offers up a person as a specimen to the viewer, like a dead butterfly pinned to a collector board. Rouy’s paintings are full of life, even if we can’t quite make out the “real” person behind the abstraction. That’s by design: Rouy is more of a tease. “There’s always this remove with my work, something I’m not revealing or exposing entirely. A smoke-and-mirrors quality, to some extent. Something withheld or restrained,” he explains. The same could be said of the persona Rouy has presented to the public. He was first discovered in 2017 by the South London dealer Hannah Barry, whose roster was filled with other emerging artists adept at social media, such as the photographer Harley Weir, whom Rouy dated. (Later, he was tied to Tali Lennox, Annie’s daughter.) By now, his Instagram profile, where he has almost 100,000 followers, suggests he is practiced in managing his own image in the service of his work, though he doesn’t quite see it that way. “The only part I have control over is what comes out of the studio. That’s my bit. And the rest is ultimately the unknown,” Rouy says. Still, the market for his work can’t be far from his mind. “I don’t ever let it come into the studio psyche. But you have to be aware — you’re being the businessperson, thinking of the sustainability of your life and work. I think about it. We think about it.” The “we” refers to Rouy’s galleries: Hauser & Wirth, which has represented him since 2024, and Hannah Barry Gallery, which still shows him in London. (“Reprise” is the second half of a two-part exhibition that opened at her space in June and sold out.) All parties are aware of the momentum behind Rouy and the pitfalls of being branded a hot young thing. “It’s his career,” says Neil Wenman, global creative director and partner at Hauser & Wirth. “It’s not our career at the end of the day, and with Hannah, we must think of the long game to help George form building blocks that will guide him for the future, not just for the first ten minutes of fame.” For the gallery, which deals in artist estates as well as with living artists, Rouy plays an important role. An operation of its scale must sell the kind of credentialed, “legacy” work that commands a market premium — the average age of Hauser & Wirth’s living artists is around 60 — but new blood is vital to prevent the program from turning into a “Best Of” classic-rock station. In Rouy, it has the rarest of birds: an edgy artist steeped in a painting tradition that is palatable to older collectors. In Rouy’s experience, figurative painting was once seen as embarrassingly retrograde. “When I was in art school, beauty was one of those buzzwords that was like …” he tells me, miming both shock and disgust. But young New York–based artists such as Salman Toor and Louis Fratino have since become critical and commercial darlings. And Chloe Wise has capitalized on the broader public’s appetite for realism by leveraging her Instagram audience to build a side career as a fashion-circuit fixture. Rouy, too, is unafraid to make work that is unabashedly handsome, even decorative. “Beauty is just the catalyst for entry,” he says. The real point “is how to navigate what comes after that.” As we tour the room, we come across a large painting in his “phantom” series rendered in an austere palette of charcoal or graphite on chrome paint. It reminds me of Andy Warhol’s “Silver” paintings from the 1960s, which use a similar palette and scale, and I suggest that nobody has really metabolized Warhol yet: There’s something corny about him, but he’s also prophetic and everywhere. “You look at the car-crash paintings, or his piss paintings, or the electric chair, and it’s everything. They’re like a vanitas,” Rouy says, referring to Renaissance paintings that allegorize human mortality and hubris. “And they’re humorous in a fucked-up way.” Like Warhol, Rouy makes work balancing on the razor’s edge between sincerity and cynicism. In the past, his process began with compiling photographic references that he worked over in Photoshop as a kind of drawing. He then painted from that research, which might include found imagery and old paintings. In a recent series, he has gone further, looking into the output of generative-AI tools. “You press a button and it creates an almost LinkedIn-style, generic kind of super-realistic passport photo, but it’s fucked, like an anti-portrait,” he says. We’ve circled back to a large painting of two female figures side by side, and as he speaks, Rouy seems both amused and repulsed by the technology at his fingertips. “We’re in this moment now where humans have created their own image in the depiction of a society that doesn’t quite exist, and I was interested in putting that into a painting. Where’s the sense of truth? It’s all 1’s and 0’s now.” George Rouy Makes a Bigger Splash Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.