31/05/2026
Harry Woodrow’s Private Jets is coming to an end.
It has been such a pleasure to show these strange, funny and oddly persuasive paintings from his Here Come the Warm Jets series. On the face of it, the subject could hardly be less promising: whirlpool baths, spa baths, moulded objects of private leisure. But that is exactly where the interest begins.
Woodrow takes something familiar, faintly absurd and already over-designed, then lets painting do something to it. The whirlpool bath stops being simply a product. It becomes a body, a machine, a shell, a wound, a spacecraft, a private escape pod. The jets become pores, buttons, eyes, cosmetic implants. Empty seats imply absent bodies. Creams, blues, pinks and black plastic begin to feel cosmetic, medical, luxurious and embarrassing all at once.
In today’s Substack, What Has Happened to It?, I wrote about the question that sits behind a lot of interesting art: not whether an artist is allowed to use a particular subject, but what has happened to it once it has passed through the work.
These paintings are good examples of that. They look simple, almost deadpan, but they are more fertile than they first appear. The transformation is not grand or theatrical. It happens through a kind of distorted appropriateness - the subject is still recognisable, but painting has made it stranger, more bodily, more revealing.
Image, object, appliance and body begin to fold into one another. The result is not just a satire of luxury, although it is funny. It is a sharp portrait of contemporary desire: comfort engineered, packaged, polished and sold back to us as escape.
Private Jets
Harry Woodrow
Blackbird Rook
Online until 4 June 2026
DM for details or the full catalogue.
