Among the paintings, video work, a collage wall, comic strips and an array of sculptures currently on display in a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, all the works seem to ask, what if something bad has already happened?
With over three decades of materials on show, the earlier work from the 1990s is full of bodies, piled up, tied-up, mutilated, hung-up, or put to work in cramped nightmares equally reminiscent of Carolee Schneemann and Jeff Keen as well as Hieronmyous Bosch and Bruegel the Elder – the details crowded out by fleshy, violent movement. Constructed in an irreverent style that blends elements of collage and cartoons, there’s a visceral fascination with how pain is both intolerable and comic.