Private Jets
Harry Woodrow
May 7 - June 4 2026
Blackbird Rook is pleased to present Private Jets, an online exhibition of recent paintings by Harry Woodrow from his ongoing body of work Here Come the Warm Jets.
The subject is, on the face of it, wonderfully unpromising: the jacuzzi, the spa bath, the moulded object of private leisure. But Woodrow has found in this faintly absurd object something oddly exact about the present. These are not paintings about bathing, or even
really about luxury. They are paintings about the way contemporary desire is designed - how comfort is engineered, packaged, polished and sold back to us as a form of escape.
Woodrow first became interested in these forms while scrolling online. For a moment, he was not quite sure what he was looking at. The objects seemed less like domestic leisure equipment than spacecraft, prosthetic shells, medical devices or small private vehicles for leaving the world behind. That uncertainty remains at the centre of the work. The jacuzzi appears as a kind of portrait of contemporary design: seductive, ridiculous,
bodily and strange.
The paintings are funny, but not in the thin sense of being jokes. Woodrow does not sneer at the object. He lets it implicate itself. The promise of wellness, retreat and self-soothing is there, but so too is the faint embarrassment of aspiration. Jets become pores, buttons, wounds, eyes, cosmetic implants. Empty seats imply absent bodies. Pale creams, mint greens, anaemic blues and fleshy pinks give the works a cosmetic softness, while black panels, chrome nozzles and sharp synthetic accents pull them back towards
machine language.
Visit the show at blackbirdrook.com or DM
@blackbird_rook for a pdf
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