This new solo show of Michael Bastow is focused on a series of nudes drawn over the last two years during the pandemic.

Alone in his studio in the south of France, he has created these pastels without models but he has used as a base the hundreds of nude portraits he made in Paris in the 80’s and 90’s. As these models were his friends, there is a sense of complicity and provocation in the drawings. Their suggestive poses place the viewer at the heart of the equivocal relation between the artist and the model. Michael Bastow reinterprets the myth of Pygmalion in that, in these artificial visions, the viewer becomes a puppet of his own fantasies. 

“These pastels are my confinement drawings. For the last two years, they have been pinned to the walls of my studio to ripen in a way. From time to time, they have been unpinned to be ‘taken further forward’ to use an expression of the Australian painter Asher Bilu. This process could be repeated over and over. Each iteration was photographed and dated.

These works refer to some of my favourite nudes in the history of art, the odalisques of Matisse, especially the drawings and the pose he used in his ‘Nu Bleu (Souvenir de Biskra)’. There are also references to Manet, Courbet and Rodin, and to the subtle eroticism and false modesty of the Renaissance artists, particularly in the ‘Danae’ by Titian. The kindergarten series with Pinocchio’s nose alludes to the work of the German expressionist artists Beckmann, Heckel and Grosz.

The pastels are done from memory and from the model drawings I did while living in Paris. I have invented some of the personages by combining elements from different drawings, faces, hands, breasts, vulvas, etc. This creates a dynamism different from that in the original sketches. The simple replacing of hands can eroticise an otherwise anodyne pose, as Rodin showed with his numerous recombinations, transforming and recomposing figures from what he called his ‘abattis’.”

Michael Bastow, February 2022


Born in 1943 (United-Kingdom), he lives and works in the south of France.

Michael Bastow works with pastels and charcoal on handmade papers. Although he has also painted several series of landscapes, the main subject of his work is the ambivalent relationship between the artist and his models. His friend Roland Topor wrote about him that “he strives to paint women to give them what they don’t have : his desire“. In 2000, he bought the Saint Alexis Chapel in Malaucène which has become, over the years, a monumental project of ephemeral frescos. His work is part of many private and public collections, including the Frac Franche-Comté and of the Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain (MAMAC) in Liège.