Exhibition review: Physical Culture and And The Soul is for the Birds at Nottingham Contemporary

One of those oft-repeated did-you-knows that never quite loses its allure for me is that Roman statues were, originally, painted. Polychromatic approaches to classical sculpture have risen with advancements in technology allowing archaeologists to reconstruct colouring from residual flecks of paint, and the sometimes alarmingly garish paintjobs present viewers with a challenge - squaring the statues’ original look with the blanched, careful anatomy of the public imagination. The process allows viewers to take statues off their pedestals, and consider them as part of the ancient world’s popular culture, rather than a piece of high art. 

Physical Culture, Nottingham Contemporary’s newest offering, is another exercise in demystification. The exhibition consists of a fully operational gym, consisting of simplistic, rickety exercise machines whose barbells are adorned not with simplistic black weights, but jesmonite recreations of the heads of classical sculptures. The functionality is impressive, and when I visited on opening night, it was being demonstrated live by fitness trainers as part of the exhibition, but the atmosphere was doing most of the heavy lifting. The space’s bright lighting and thumping music is pointedly gymlike, and attendees move between the two gallery spaces on a hurdled running track demarcated by blue tape that, over the varnished floorboards of the Contemporary, bears an unmistakable resemblance to a school sports hall. 

Although the weights are replaced with heads, they aren’t busts. The heads are, instead, recreated in isolation from the bodies that they once topped, taken from statues like Apollo Belvedere and Michelangelo’s David. Elsewhere, bodies are subdivided even further. Next to a pull-up bar hangs a vest weighted down with a plaster relief of an eye; elsewhere, cable pulleys terminate in blocks depicting single ears. As well as fitness trainers, the exhibition is interspersed with artists, who stand attentively at easels performing life drawings of the participants and sculptures alike. These drawings, like the sculptures themselves, divide up bodies and exercises into constituent parts, different angles of flexion and extension that mirrors the mythic quality of fitness.

Our attention, and that of the artists, is split between faces and bodies; we’re invited to view sculpture not as an anatomical exercise like bodybuilding, but instead as a means to depict emotion. The inclusion of the face of Dying Gaul, whose face in the original sculpture is angled away from the viewer, upright alongside the exhibition’s other heads, allows us to divest our perspective from the physical and focus instead on the figure’s emotion. This is helped by the presence of the trainers, who are mostly affable and chatty, conversing and moving freely among machines that look like they were assembled by hand from scraps. 

The fittingly classical-sounding artist Augustas Serapinas created the exhibition first as a student at the Vilnius Academy of Art in 2012, and it has been internationally exhibited since then. The exhibition’s initial purpose was, nominally, to showcase the duality of the artistic and the physical by blending the artist’s studio and the gym into a shared space, where bodybuilders and illustrators alike pay close, repetitive and obsessive attention to musculature, drawing up bodies along the idealised, transcendent lines of classical sculpture. “Today,” Serapinas suggests, “Gyms serve as temples of the body, making physical training a cultural ritual”. 

But, since 2012, the issue at hand has bulked up, and Physical Culture doesn’t seem to have sized up along with it. The intersection of bodybuilding and philhellenism has taken on a life of its own as a political symbol; it seems incredibly prescient that the entire thing was conceived before pop-conservative writers like Mike Ma and Bronze Age Pervert enshrined destructive narcissism as a core tenet of hyper-online conservatism. Even as these more flagrant ideas have faded from the conversation, their ideological descendants have entered the mainstream through a renewed fascination with the “manosphere” and “looksmaxxing”. This cultural progression is the kind of thing that could have, nearly fifteen years on, imbued Physical Culture with a new angle. But while that shadow hangs over the exhibition despite the overhead lights, Physical Culture struggles to extricate itself from the mythic parallels of art, sculpture and fitness upon which it was first drawn up. 

Elsewhere in the Contemporary lies And the soul is for the birds, a solo exhibition of the work of Brazilian painter Chico da Silva, the first of its kind on European soil. A more relaxed exhibition than Physical Culture, da Silva’s work is displayed across three small partitioned rooms, warmly lit in orange, each piece displayed without titles.

While the remit of da Silva’s work seems perhaps a little basic - a self taught painter whose work, according to the gallery, ‘calls attention to the interconnectedness of everything’ - his work is anything but. Each painting has the quality of a fairytale bestiary; what initially seem like simple images of colourful fish and birds soon alter themselves into indeterminate animals made up of textile patterns and odd features. Forked tongues and sharp teeth feature prominently, even among birds and quadripedal animals that resemble cows or horses. 

Many of da Silva’s paintings are fringed with patterns that seem like foliage, which gives the exhibition a holistic quality, a series of vignettes interspersed through an expansive, amphibious forest. Violence is a recurring theme. Animals are mostly depicted side-on, snarling at once another, often so close that the extremities of their mouths cross into one another. In the hallucinatory, zero-gravity environments of da Silva’s vivid, swampy landscapes, creatures are either actively grappling, or simply considering each other, teeth bared. 

The message is resonant. Brutality and interconnectedness are not mutually exclusive. There is something, even in the tableaux of scraps, that is tender and exploratory; the creatures bear no wounds, and their skin is arranged in segmented sections of tessellated patterns that deconstruct warring animals into beautifully textured sections capable of completely arresting a viewer’s attention away from snapping jaws. Occasionally, da Silva’s usual side-on perspective falters, and a creature will sport two eyes rather than one, and this momentary revelation of perspective is often staggering. 

Early on in the gallery, I found myself particularly struck by Jellyfish and Piranhas. The piece depicts a shoal of piranhas, sawtoothed mouths dumbfoundedly half-open, swimming in the wake of a massive jellyfish, as it unthinkingly moves through the rough pattern of the top of the frame. The jellyfish looks strange and eldritch, a network of varicose strings coursing through its bell that emerge from a pair of crazed eyes. Towards the edge of the bell, blues and reds create a series of arches reminiscent of a big top circus tent to which the piranhas are attempting to gain polite access and, in the midst of the grappling, biting creatures that decorate the walls around me, I find this extremely serene. 

Chico da Silva’s And the soul is for the birds and Augustas Serapinas’ Physical Culture are exhibiting at Nottingham Contemporary until Sunday 6 September 2026.

nottinghamcontemporary.org