Sterling vs Bacon: Artists in dialogue in Olivia Sterling’s Pity the Meat! Exhibition 

It makes almost too much sense for an artist as obsessed with food as Olivia Sterling to be paired with Francis Bacon. I mean come on, Sterling for Bacon? That’s money well spent.

And what a match up. The singular, brilliant Francis Bacon – represented here by one stunning, tormented image of two bodies on the verge of being locked in the classic Bacon clash of embrace and brawl – brought into close, intimate dialogue with one of the most exciting young painters working today.

Bacon always had a knack for blurring the boundaries between bodies, between lovers, between figures caught somewhere in the chasm between love and violence. And Sterling blurs plenty of boundaries herself.

The line between body and food – the self and what the self consumes – has always been shaky in Sterling’s work, but this new series pushes things further than ever before. Bodies tumble and wrestle while smearing gateaus and spilling milk, faces get smashed into cakes, flesh looks like meat, fat looks cream, and on and on.

Photography: Denisa Ilie

Bacon and Sterling have similar, though contradictory, aims. Bacon dehumanises in order to universalise. He treats people like meat, because we’re all meat; we’re not personalities and souls and hopes and dreams, we’re just meat, all of us, suffering through the humiliation of life.

He reduces his figures down to their most basic element (meat!) to highlight our total lack of difference, he does it because we are all the same.

But Sterling dehumanises (there has to be a better term for blurring the boundary between person and food – she enfoodifies? Culinises?) because we might all be the same, but we’re all treated differently. We’re all meat, sure, but in the grand supermarket of life, some of us are treated like Tesco Value bangers, and some of us are treated like Duchy of Cornwall organic chipolatas.

Value is inscribed in all of us by the bodies we’re born into, and that value is reinforced throughout our lives.

The idea here is that Bacon’s work seems to emerge from some deep, primal, basic, inner turmoil, like all the angst of existence is leaking out through the brush and paint and onto the canvas. It is an interior work, a painting that comes from within.

But Sterling’s work seems to emerge from without: a very similar sense of turmoil and angst leaking out through the brush and paint and onto the canvas, but conditioned by the stress, frustration, anger, anxiety and absurdity of living in an unjust society.

But Bacon and Sterling also share so much. Bacon’s work here is tactile to the point that you can almost feel the bodies intertwining, the pressure of the arm locking around your head, the legs twisting around your own torso. And Sterling’s work is tactile to the point where you can almost taste the bacon fat, the thick cream, the sweet cocktail cherries. They both bring you into their world, almost physically, to get their point across.

But where Bacon is tortured, overwrought and deeply emotional, Sterling is ultra-funny, whip-smart, hugely critical and cartoonishly obvious. Somewhere between Beryl Cook, Tom & Jerry and Bell Hooks, that’s where you’ll find Olivia Sterling, peeling back the outer layers of marginalisation, whiteness and blackness, sexism and racism, like the skin on a sausage.

They make for a perfect pairing, these two. It’s red wine and steak, peanut butter and jam, beer and crisps. Absolutely delicious.

Pity the Meat! Runs at Norwich University of the Arts’ East Gallery until Saturday 18 April. See the exhibition details and plan your visit.