With gallery doors closed due to the recent lockdown brought on by COVID-19, it is satisfying to picture Alexis HUNTER's rowdy, seductive output in such proximity to London's long-awaited Artemisia Gentileschi show. "If you bury yourself in Artemisia's golden folds, you know she really loved painting¹," Hunter observed after her own return to painting in the 1980s. Artemisia was one of the influences she cited as a painter, together with Fragonard, Monet and Goya², so she was shy, apparently, neither of pleasure, nor horror.

Money Art Sex. How problematic. How attention grabbing. Hunter used the title for a lecture at the LSE in 1993: like so much of her work, it was punchy but far from simple. “One aspect of my populism was to make images that appealed to the part of the brain that snaps to attention on seeing the fetish – the mother’s shoes and the fur for instance – and danger – fire, sharp objects, cracks, blood […] the important thing was to get people to look at the work in the first place,” she explained in 1997³.

Hunter’s new mythology – her cosmopolitan pantheon of goddesses, muses, devils and beasts – evolved as an act of re-telling, or perhaps an exorcism. Her destabilised mythic power structures are expressed in chimerical creatures – their bodies composed of multiple species – that she described representing "inner human conflicts, just as artists fantasized about the unknown in Medieval times⁴."