Of all the parts of the human body, none has compelled artists more persistently, across more cultures and centuries, than the hand. It is at once the most ordinary and the most miraculous of instruments — the site where thought becomes action, where inner life reaches outward and leaves its mark upon the world. To paint or sculpt a hand is, in some sense, to portray the very faculty of making itself.
From the negative stencils preserved at Pech Merle and El Castillo to the modelled gestures of late antique sculpture and the diagrammatic mudrās of Buddhist iconography, the hand has functioned simultaneously as sign and signature. This exhibition assembles works spanning some two millennia, in which the hand is the principal subject of attention.
The hand is rarely only itself: an open palm, a clenched fist, a hand at rest, reaching or holding, conveys information the face has traditionally been asked to supply — hesitation, assurance, tension or composure. The fist has long served as an emblem of defence, of authority and of resistance, from Roman manus to twentieth-century political iconography; the handshake remains a codified social rite, manual rhetoric accompanies spoken language, and signed languages constitute fully grammatical systems articulated through gesture alone. In painting, drawing and sculpture, such gestures are arrested and held, permitting sustained scrutiny of forms ordinarily perceived only in passage.
Curated by Omar Mazhar, the exhibition traces a sustained preoccupation with what hands do and what they signify. Raised in blessing, closed in resolve or laid open in address, the hand persists as one of the most economical and exacting forms by which art has represented the human.