Flower in the Wind

This is an exhibition conceived from stasis. After stasis. That is, after a period of being transfixed. Fixed in a place, at a time. Held for a moment whilst life flutters on by. Still. There was magic in that moment of modernist witnessing. When We and I and the ‘Eyes of the gallery’ were taken in by the fragility of sheer formalist touch. By oil and pencil and canvas as graduations in tender-pink.

Titled after Agnes Martin’s 1963 painting, Flower in the Wind, is not an exhibition in homage to this iconic artist. Rather, the artists we have assembled here, each, in their own way, translate something of the smooth nonchalance that suffuses Martin’s minimalist grid works; making sensorial the “freedom from the cares of this world, from worldliness” that Martin’s oeuvre embodies so totally.

Spanning sculpture and film, painting and printing processes, the artworks that compose Flower in the Wind subtly embrace the dissonance afforded through abstraction—be this visual or conceptual methods of impression making—to give porousness and possibility a form. That is, to evoke something of the release that comes when one sets out to escape the solidified world, with its tightly wrought surface narratives, creating and confining and caressing a new place of material abundance into existence through material imaginings.

Niamh O’Malley

As light pours through Belmacz’s window, it meets the two glass forms created by Niamh O’Malley: Rose, fold (2023) and Rose, vertical (2023). Through Niamh’s folding glass undulations, this light, these beams, become all rouge, all alive, dancy even. And, yet at the same time, as these beams move through Niamh’s thin panes, they become delicate, still. Aligning with Niamh’s interest in how artistic interventions can transform one’s encounter with space and the world, these wall-based works shift our perceptions, making the otherwise static space of the white-walled gallery (cube) vibrate, all delicate. And in this way, these works epitomise the freedom so totally embodied by Agnes Martin’s works.

Niamh O’Malley (b. 1975, Co.Mayo, Ireland) lives and works in Dublin, Ireland.

Camilla Løw

Camilla Løw speaks a minimal language. Echoing a lineage of modernism and constructivist artistic practices, Camilla’s works not only foreground form but playfully cite the matters of their making. In Flower in the Wind the titles of Camilla’s sculptural works, Alchemy (II), (IV), and (V), reference not only the chemical surface of these cuboid stems (the mat surface black oxidised stainless steel vessels) but allude to the number of constituting arms that jut together to give each blooming form its architectural body. As with much of Camilla’s works, by speaking of and to themselves, these functional vessels invite us to reflect upon the very nature of the place we constitute, here the space and function of the gallery.

Camilla Løw (b.1976, Oslo, Norway) lives and works in Oslo.

Bassam Issa

The works featured in Flower in the Wind, each come from iterative series where Bassam Issa (formally Bassam Al-Sabah) delves into the amorphous effect of socio-cultural becoming on bodily relations. Specifically, how familial and cultural histories interweave (as with his series of small resin paintings), or how the abstract digital can become something of a bodily form (seen here in his 3D metal prints).

In his series of resin paintings, collectively grouped under the title Giant monsters and horrible aliens! Endless Fanservice! Incredible plot twists and collective laughter at sunset, Bassam reproduces old family photographs. Laden with memory and sentiment these painterly renditions are overlaid with text corralled from cartoons. Taken out of context, this textual layer morphs, taking on darker, perhaps more sinister, connotations, especially when framed within our current climate of war and violence.

Building upon his interest in the relationship between bodies and digital technologies, Bassam’s series of small 3D-printed metal sculptures each alludes to the growing importance/presence of one’s digital body. Printed in bronze or steel alloys, and then plated with gold, each of the abstracted forms printed here mimics the shape of a relic or body part. In this way, Bassam gives a historical primacy to these digitally produced anthropomorphic forms.

Bassam Issa (b. Iraq) lives and works between Belfast and Dublin.

Vladimir Nikolić

“Assembling images with small mirrors, each one reflecting a fragment of the entire scene, I was captured by the beauty of the simple natural phenomena. I had a meditative experience watching the actual light being held in my hand, and how my fingers can touch the horizon, distant objects, a cloud, birds in the sky, someone’s face, or darkness. It seemed like a metaphor for the experience of the Cheselden’s patient (1728), who had the impression his eyes were touched by everything in his sight (being near or far away) after recovery from blindness. In our time, the life is being experienced by touching the image of it. Does it make us half blind, since we are able to see it but we also have to touch it? Or it makes us doubly blind, since we are touching something that actually isn’t there?”
—Vladimir Nikolić, 2013

Vladimir Nikolić (b. 1974, Belgrade, Serbia) lives and works in Belgrade.

Simon Popper

Two monumental paintings by Simon Popper feature in Flower in the Wind. Representing a larger series of four works, these seemingly simple constellations picture something of a spring sunset—the changing atmosphere refracted upon pink clouds. Constructed from American milk bottle tops, the red dot forms that flutter upon the plain of each of these scapes not only brings to mind associations of cherry blossom loose in an evening breeze but echo star-laden photos of the night sky. Seen as humanly maps, each logging Simon’s milk intake, these quasi-astrological paintings make vivid something of the connections that exist between the corporeal self and the cosmos that surrounds.

Simon Popper (b. 1977, London, UK) lives and works in Califonia.

Olu Ogunnaike

Burnt wood upon mirrored steel, Olu Ogunnaike is a master printmaker, amongst other things. Formally his work 19:58_27 Mar 21 (2023) is a charcoal dust silkscreen. Here, using the fine grains of scorched willow, Olu gives a new surface to a fleeting memory; a moment of conviviality had at 7:58pm on March 27 2021, one recorded and stored safely on his phone. Revolving around ideas of self and memory, the delicacy of this monochrome silkscreen surface directly alludes to the quiet space of shared sociality—to moments of joyful togetherness as well as moments of mourning.

Olu Ogunnaike (b. London, 1986) lives and works in London.

Georgina Hill

Georgina Hill’s works have a calmness to them. They are delicate and seemingly fragile. They are not naive, however; these boxy forms are purposefully, politically, optimistic. Composed from quotidian refuse—cardboard, newspaper, dated bric-a-brac, dried flowers—and electronic components, the two sculptural pieces that feature in Flower in the Wind literally move, drawing us into a microcosmic refuge. That is, by re-ordering the sensible world, refusing to cast this aside as trash, the formalities of  Wage packet VI (2023) and Glove box (2023) offer out to us a small space of escape and/or protection. Or at least this is one story they invite.

Georgina Hill (b. 1986, Worcester, UK) lives and works in London.

Hawazin Alotaibi

Hawazin Alotaibi’s work examines notions of gender, masculinity, and self-representation on social media in the ever-changing cultural and political dynamics in the Arab world, specifically Gulf countries. Working with an experimental printing and painting process Hawazin embraces glitches and moments of soft focus, using these as critical junctures—loopholes perhaps—through which to challenge omnipotent stereotypes and the pressures of becoming within a socio-cultural community. Despite her focus on the political dynamics in the Arab world, Hawazin’s work fundamentally speaks beyond this geographical region, not only questing the fixity of masculine ‘norms’ as they rub up against the grains of our contemporary era but challenging how our contemporary era is, in itself, imposing new regimes of gendered dynamics.

Hawazin Alotaibi (b. 1993, Wisconsin, USA) lives and works in London.

Footnote
Flower in the Wind, a poem
—Toby Üpson