Small Erotics takes its title from Michael Kirkham’s 2015 exhibition Small Erotics and Still Lives at The Corridor in Reykjavík, Iceland, but the portfolio brings together a much broader selection of his intimate colour paintings. Where some of Kirkham’s larger compositions construct elaborate scenes of urban isolation, these works frequently reduce the world to a figure, a bed, a sofa, a patch of landscape or a few carefully chosen objects. The effect is intensely concentrated: the viewer is brought unusually close to the bodies and situations depicted.

Eroticism is rarely presented here as straightforwardly pleasurable. Kirkham’s figures may be engaged in sexual activity, reclining in suggestive poses, touching themselves or one another, but the paintings retain the peculiar emotional distance that characterises his work more generally. Faces are often expressionless or turned away, while the bodies have an almost unnaturally smooth, luminous presence. As Kirkham himself has explained, his figures are constructed rather than copied from photographic sources, developing from remembered images, sketches and fragments of experience into carefully built pictorial spaces.

The paintings consequently occupy an ambiguous territory between realism and fantasy. A woman lying on a bed may appear completely naturalistic, yet the strange stillness of the scene makes her seem almost like an object in a still life. Elsewhere, bodies are arranged in intimate encounters that might suggest tenderness, indifference, voyeurism or transaction. Even paintings apparently showing couples together leave open the possibility that the figures have no relationship at all.

The settings range from anonymous interiors to streets and wasteland. In his later work, Kirkham increasingly allows incidental details, dirt, graffiti and other informal elements into his constructed worlds, reflecting the influence of Berlin.

Across Kirkham’s paintings light is important. Skin, hair, fabric and furniture are rendered with a smooth, reflective detailing that can make the figures seem simultaneously tangible and unreal. His erotic world is one of proximity without intimacy – we are invited to look closely, but what we see remains elusive. Small Erotics gathers these moments of suspended desire into a revealing survey of one of the most quietly unsettling aspects of his painting.