The way we live reflects something larger than our everyday lives. It reveals the values, tensions and shifts that define an era. Art often becomes the space in which these take visual form.
Desire, the need for closeness, freedom, loneliness and a sense of belonging lie at the heart of the human experience. Yet as societies change, so too does the way we experience and understand them. Art often captures these shifts before we have even found the words to describe them.
This is the starting point for The Way We Live Now at the George Economou Collection, the Collection’s first group exhibition of contemporary art. Its title refers to Anthony Trollope’s 1875 novel of the same name, a sharp commentary on the transformative impact of power during the industrial age. More than 150 years later, the exhibition turns its attention to the present through works by artists who explore how their time shapes the human experience.
Structured around three sections, Intimacy, Politics and Existence, the exhibition begins with love and sexual desire, examining the need for closeness, attraction and the ways in which our relationships shape how we see ourselves and others. Intimacy thus becomes a lens through which to approach the human experience in all its complexity.
In Politics, personal experience meets collective life. The body, individuality and freedom take on political dimensions, while the works explore our relationship with the structures that shape life within society. Choice and dissent lie at the heart of this section, alongside the question of how free we really are to determine our place in the world.
Existence returns to the body. The female form and the nude become starting points for an exploration of desire and physicality, while sculptural works focus on both coexistence and isolation, on the need for human connection and the difficulties it can entail.
Among the participating artists are Louise Bourgeois, David Hockney, Jenny Saville, David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, Charles Ray, Lisa Brice and Henry Taylor. Different generations and artistic languages come together, united by an interest in the ways in which the personal and the social interact.
The exhibition is co-curated by writer and The New Yorker contributor Hilton Als and Ann Philbin, Director Emerita of the Hammer Museum, in collaboration with Skarlet Smatana, Director of the George Economou Collection.
Love, desire, power, freedom, the body, loneliness. Six words that describe different aspects of the human experience and run throughout The Way We Live Now. Through the artists’ works, the personal meets the collective and the body encounters the world around it, in an exhibition that looks at the present through the relationships, desires and conflicts that shape it.
On view until March 2027 at the George Economou Collection.
