Uniting thematically related material by canonical figures and ambitious up-and-comers is a well-worn group-show conceit. But “Eruption,” organized by the Jarvis Art gallery and the art dealer Max Werner, does it with finesse and surprise, its 18 pictures portraying human bodies marked by mixtures of anxiety, lust and freedom.
The elders include Neo-Expressionists like Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl and Georg Baselitz, whose splotchy 2001 portrait of Joseph Stalin is enigmatic and upside-down. (A Baselitz quotation also provides the show’s title: “Art is visceral and vulgar; it’s an eruption.”)
But the most satisfying contribution is by the category-eluding octogenarian painter Sylvia Snowden, an oozing, smoldering 1978 near-abstraction from which two hands appear to be growing.
The young guns tend toward cooler, more restrained visions. (If they’re erupting, it’s inward.) Besuited men walk, downcast, through an eerie landscape in a Jan Eustachy Wolski work. Spectral people, here and not, populate wan paintings by Konstantina Krikzoni and Andrew Woolbright.
Alexandra Metcalf presents a femme fatale perched atop a couch, somehow merging with it, while a golden figure is camouflaged with the surrounding world in a beguiling 2026 painting by Osama Al Rayyan.
In a frightening Georgia Gardner Gray work, at least, a man is wailing, kneeling as he presses his hands together. Expressionism can provide catharsis, and this does, until you start wondering about the two men looming behind him.