Paul Rumsey nearly always works in charcoal on paper. He calls his work ‘metaphoric realism’, explaining ‘My work belongs to the tradition of the grotesque and fantastic. It is possible to classify the various ways that reality is distorted in this kind of work – the mixing of forms, changes of scale, elongations, compressions and reversals. The word grotesque is derived from grotto – the caves, the buried palaces of Rome, where renaissance artists discovered fantastical Roman decoration. They adopted this style and it spread throughout Europe. The origins of the grotesque lie in antiquity, the hybrid creatures of mythology, where the forms of nature, animal, human and vegetable even mineral, are mixed together, which often feature in my drawings.’

Rumsey has written very little about the specifically sexual elements in his work, but maybe this is precisely because he senses that the patriarchal realities reflected in the scenarios he depicts – screaming male babies with large erect penises, cock-laden cityscapes, figures with cocks for heads engaged in ‘manly’ pursuits, cock figures arguing – are all too familiar with his audience. Look out particularly for Bunch of Dicks Running About Without Any Kind of a Plan from 2016, the Bodyhead and Mr Punch series, and towards the end the three powerful Republic Arsehole drawings made during the 2016 US president1al campaign. The selection concludes with his witty Reversible Head from 2012.