Exhibition 58
PM/AM, London
Gaia Ozwyn, Helen Teede, Hwi Hahm, Katherine Qiyu Su, Mia Chaplin and Sonya Derviz
30th October – 23rd November, 2024
Ancient cultures transformed mystery into legends and stories, creating human narratives out of remarkable and magnificent events. This method of responding to the unknown saw no boundary between the distant wonders of outer space and the locality of folklore. It can seem that the advance of technology, for all its benefits, has shrunken our capacity to imagine and respond so profoundly to our environment. As our culture has become ever more driven by visual information, the subtleties in our other senses reduce. In spite of this, how can we imagine the modern age as an environment where mythmaking still exists, aided and influenced by facets of a more developed civilisation?
PM/AM’s autumn group show takes this question as a starting point, looking at the ways we respond to our existence as a network of interlocking components, exploring the kinds of interactions that influence imaginative ways of understanding the world. The methods employed by our ancestors are updated and recontextualised in the present, through the creative adeptness of the artists. It will undo the rigidity of physical forms, explore the depth of layered colours and what they can represent, and use textural contrasts to pull the mind of the viewers towards and through the work.
The show aims to express what seemed more present to pre-industrial humankind but is more hidden today - our ability to intuit, to feel the resonance of a world that, even in today’s frantic dash, retains innate mystical qualities that inspire symbolism, ceremony and myth. The artists in this exhibition express what is seen by how it feels to see it, exploring aspects of our existence through multiple, overlapping lenses. The body becomes an ephemeral entity, the natural world a networked sentient being, objects are elevated to reverence and elemental forces take on emotional qualities. The defining lines that ringfence politics, geography, history and society are abstracted.
Encountering the world with traditional categories broken out into open frameworks allows us to align ourselves with our surroundings, rather than existing in contrast or conflict. It places us in a better position to draw back over history to a time when reality was an approximation, where intuition held out over fixed ideas of truth.
Picturing the Animal
Co-curated with Sonya Derviz
Sherbet Green, London
Sonya Derviz, Sof'ya Shpurova, Danilo Stojanovic and Evangeline Turner
27th September - 2nd November 2024
The group exhibition Picturing the Animal unites works by four international artists that gesture to the sentiment of human experience and the production of meaning (knowledge) around it. The matter-of-fact understanding of a picture as a representation of physical reality has been delineated within painting, and with this canonical evolution came an invitation to interrogate the less-easily-categorical processes of such fabrication. Among a million others: the bearing of soul.
“Linguistic relativity” refers to the hypothesis that a language’s structure influences a speaker’s output, an idea that, though originating in the field of linguistics, could be applied across artistic practice, as much as written and spoken language. What separates these latter outputs from visual languages is that they exist within a more controlled set of syntactic principles (illustrated by Noam Chomsky using “syntax trees”), requiring that we use words in certain orders, or in certain amalgamations, in order to be understood. Visual language does not seem bound by such rules, exemplifying that it either does not exist within human order as a purely communicative tool, or that we have yet to understand, more than vaguely, the laws of generating meaning inside of it.
Often, art is produced as a phenomenological tool, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in his Eye and Mind (Spirit) (1964), in which he explores painting as a language for mining and depicting subjective existence. This is also reflected in Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1988), a self-declared affirmation “of the reality of spirit and the reality of matter [and an attempt to determine] the relation of the one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory.” The works in this exhibition have been brought together for their shared evocation of this process of human experience. Not in the sense that they directly evoke human life, per se, but that they manifest its psyche within the direct context of painting.
There are moments of intense saturation, of movement, techniques of introversion and semi-fictitious, fragmented narratives in these paintings. Often, there is a lack of surety. A kind of paganism or philosophical mobility beset in unclean lines and powdered tones evocative of transcendentalism, but with an increased rooting in physicality. Turner’s Androgenic hair scared the small children (2024), for example, could be inferred as a kaleidoscopic rendering of tangible and illusory events surrounding childhood and adolescence, while Stojanovic’s Mystic Gestures II (2024), which could read as hands in a position of conjuring, prayer or dance, juxtaposes symbols of devotion, madness and power with colours of passion, love and deceit. Shpurova’s paintings combine scales and elements to a perhaps nostalgic or melancholic internalised narrative; the way scenarios revolve psychologically and in dreams, and Derviz projects onto and recollects memory in landscapes and facial expressions inside a cropped vitrine, reflecting the complexity of feeling within both a face and as a body moving on the earth: wildness, understanding, surprise, and acceptance. A certain uncharacterised spirit occupies each work, having been constituted and expelled as such.
Photography by Damian Griffiths
Soft Focus
Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal
Sonya Derviz, Merveille Kelekele Kelekele, Rachel Lancaster, Lyne Lapointe, Sam Lipp, Nour Malas, Karice Mitchell, Athena Papadopoulos, Sequoia Scavullo, Adelisa Selimbašić, Shahin Sharafaldin
and Manuel Axel Strain
11th July - 7th September, 2024
Bradley Ertaskiran is pleased to present Soft Focus, an exhibition featuring the work of twelve international artists. Inspired by questioning what a portrait can be, the exhibition probes how figures come in and out of view, treating the genre as a source of possibility, subversion, and power. Ranging from sculpture, painting, and photography, to mixed media, these works explore the portrait as a means of how to be seen within a vast range of conditions. At times, they omit the figure altogether, invoking the unnameable facets of lived experience. Whether depicting tender moments, empty rooms, bodies in motion, or invented forms, the exhibited artworks often divert from the human realms entirely into something haunting, dreamlike, or outside of our tangible world.
Many artworks carry with them a sense of longing, captured through brief or hazy moments. Sonya Derviz creates moody, monochrome portraits in charcoal and oil on linen. The soft contours of her reposed figures bleed into the background, while dark, drowsy eyes stare eerily out at the viewer. Pulling from archival editorial images, Karice Mitchell’s prints show glamorous snippets of skin, which with their pixelated contours build a sense of pleasure, sex, and control through concealment and intrigue. Sam Lipp uses various tools to layer oil paint on steel, creating a soft, veiled effect. The screws poking through the metal canvases combined with seductive advert-like content—here, a bare shoulder and a glossy anti-anxiety medication label—recall commercial signage, with a tinge of intimacy. Rachel Lancaster’s realistic paintings emanate a gentle glow, showing glimpses of the mundane—a collarbone, a sweater hair tucked behind an ear—like remembering a specific but fleeting detail of a person from memory.
Several artists use portraiture as a tool for personal introspection and storytelling. Adelisa Selimbašić explores views of the body through everyday scenes, often portraying ambiguous features for consumption. Her work evokes the narrative of a continuous scroll of parts rather than wholes. Manuel Axel Strain prioritizes Indigenous epistemologies through the embodied knowledge of their mother, father, siblings, cousins, aunties, uncles, nieces, nephews, grandparents and ancestors in their work. In one canvas, eyes float apart from their sitter, with fish leathers hung beneath the frame, while another depicts a classical but defiant red nude, their face shrouded by an embellished rock inspired by pictographs. Shahin Sharafaldin’s paintings feature meticulously layered brushwork in vivid tones, showing mystical people and spaces as stand-ins for love, death, and yearning. In his haunting scenes of empty interiors, for example, there is a sense of presence through absence.
In other works, the distinctions between dream and nightmare, human and supernatural, are unclear. Nour Malas’ paintings harness thick, almost bloody brushstrokes, in which swathes of bold colour and shadow seem to emulate the cavernous depths of the underworld. Superimposed textures and shapes comprise Sequoia Scavullo’s abstract paintings, and sometimes, recognizable motifs or bodies peek through, like familiar elements revealing themselves during a vivid dream.
Merveille Kelekele Kelekele’s large-scale paintings are fantastical and psychologically charged, embodied in multi-face beasts with claws, horns, and gangly limbs, mighty and mad against their acidic backdrops. Using wood, ink on paper, and other materials, Lyne Lapointe fashions magical solitary figures with collage techniques. Athena Papadopoulos’ personified mixed media sculptures are worlds unto themselves; stuffed textiles, synthetic toys, and everyday goods are assembled into tentacled creatures who seem to swallow everything before them, a rich portrait of a life told through things.
In photography, soft focus originated from a technical flaw—a lens imperfection that hindered the photographer from capturing a clear picture of their subject. Here, this lack of clarity (or inability to capture) serves as the impetus for the selection of work in this exhibition. Whether it be through evoking an actual sense of movement, absence, nostalgia, empowerment or concealment, these artworks evoke the elusive qualities that hover just beyond the frame.
Photography by Paul Litherland
Sonya Derviz and Li Li Ren presented by Sherbet Green
Art-o-rama, Marseille
30th August - 1st September, 2024
Sherbet Green is pleased to present a duo show with Sonya Derviz and Li Li Ren, whose works, combined, underscore a certain attention paid by both artists to fragmentation, disjunction, surface and wholeness. The presentation follows solo exhibitions at the gallery from both artists, and builds on a body of work exhibited by Ren at both Frieze Sculpture (2023) and Dulwich Picture Gallery (2024).
In the centre of the booth sit three works from Ren, set in bronze, volcanic sand and resin. These sculptures, which originated as reflections on the sensation of motherhood, approximate forms associated with the ocean, while also subverting them through unexpected material applications and abstractions. They speak to a desire to flatten and destabilise humanism through an amplification of the similarities, as well as the strangeness, of human and non-human existence. A fourth work, a cast stomach, is situated on the wall.
Around them sit four paintings by Derviz, whose images produce a similar friction. They are made wet-on-wet using thinned oils and embedded charcoal, which provide semi-eviscerated contours to the morphing figures, faces and landscapes that capture her interest. Focusing not on the image as a whole, but on the specific elements contained within it, she draws in and repeatedly readjusts these pictures until they dissipate into new metaphysical shapes, an intuitive artistic language that veers towards expression and emotion over linearity and fixed ideas.
Photography by Margot Montigny