Idealised, erotic, comic, vulnerable. The naked body, ancient motif and mirror of contemporary attitudes, has been held to, over time, various interpretations. Thirteen artists reveal its extraordinary power, through sculpture, painting, photography, in an exhibition at the Sadie Coles HQ. In the work by Borna Sammak, Pool Party (2018), the dignity of the nude evaporates comically. Sometimes the unveiled body is capable of generating narrative associations, as in La Paloma by William N. Copley, where the woman - shaped with curves and colour - dances next to a window while a white dove alights on her chest. Then there’s the dynamic movement and erotic charge of the painting Untitled by Laura Owens. The recurring formula of the nude woman reclining is subverted in the works of Sarah Lucas and Urs Fischer. In the work of Lucas, a brush and a table allude to the prostrate female form, while Fischer uses a bronze mould of a woman’s body, impregnated with pink light, with the figure leaving space for a cartoon-like depiction laying on a beach chair.