Pia Camil: Bestia

★★★★☆

All sorts of secret, shocking things happen behind closed doors, but they probably pale in comparison to what’s happening behind the saloon-style screens in Mexican artist Pia Camil’s debut UK exhibition. Swing them open and you’re greeted with eye-popping paintings of lust and sexual freedom. A demonic, fanged creature humps away at a blindfolded woman in one, a blue-skinned being with a curly little pig’s tail performs cunnilingus on another. Everywhere you look there are bodies writhing in ecstasy, hair being pulled, stilettos being pressed into bare skin. Most of the time when you see sexual art these days it carries a big political message about exploitation and abuse, but this is the opposite: this is about the joy of sex, about liberation through desire, about a feminist reclamation of eroticism.…