Visit the online viewing room here.
Kupfer is pleased to present Saxifrage, a group exhibition featuring UK-based artists Azeri Aghayeva, Camilla Bliss, Max Boyla, Sophie Goodchild and Penelope Kupfer.
The show, which brings together painting, print, ceramics and sculpture, is named after a plant of poor soils, which typically grows at the entrance of caves. Saxifrages emerge from rocks (the Latin word saxifraga means ‘stone-breaker'), coming out of dark dens and finding scarce sunlight to blossom. The exhibition creates an analogy between the flourishing of these shapeshifting plants and the artists’ creative processes and ways of seeing. The works featured in the show are influenced by cave-like habits of complete immersion in making, as well as by the digital ‘caves’ of online interaction.
Penelope Kupfer’s Saxifrage and Wall-E works are inspired by the blossoming of the stone-breaker plants: their growing out of rocks and coming to the surface, as well as by their materiality: the moss and lichen co-existing and emerging alongside the flowers. The artist is interested in the transformation of materials, such as the cleaning cloth, repurposed as a canvas in one of her works, as well as the materiality of the image of the flower, emerging almost organically from the sponge surface of the cleaning fabric. The sponge also appears as an element in Kupfer’s paintings Kiss the Sun and Chores, in which we see an abstract figure, wearing rubber gloves and washing dishes. The act of washing up and the big gesture of the figure’s arms can be interpreted as both gentle and violent, showing endless transformation in emotions within the enclosed cave of the domestic. It is interesting to note the transformative element in relation to the scale of these works too: the large painting acts as a sketch and depicts the thinking behind the smaller work - one can recognise the same figure across the two canvases; however, each work brings a new, slightly different, dimension to this domestic scene.
While Kupfer's works consider the act of emergence, Boyla's paintings use layers of paper and paint to see how far an image can be lost within the excess. Boyla came across the figure of his space-cowboy on social media and began drawing it on his phone. From beginning to digitally drawing the figure, he transferred this process onto the canvas, building up layers, to then begin obsessively trying to extract an image from the build-up. This process recalls how an image can be lost among layers and layers in Photoshop, so much so that it becomes lost in a digital cave. In considering what can be extracted from the excess, of whether endlessly chasing after echoes of a lost image can yield a true original, Boyla toys with the threshold of the Baudrillard-ian hyperreal. The hyperreal litters our physical and digital spheres, being a 'real without origin or reality' that creates an illusion and makes it more desirable for people to buy the reality of what it gestures to, such as Disneyland, plastic Christmas trees, or more recently, AI-generated Instagram influencers/musicians.
Entering and emerging from digital caves also preoccupies Camilla Bliss' work. Bliss' process of working with plaster and ceramics has been affected by our attention spans when on our phones. Her impasto textures are made in what Bliss calls 'a non-being' state of timelessness. She likens the hand-gesture motions she uses to build surfaces to the unconscious movement of her hand swiping across a phone screen. These surfaces provoke a highly psychophysical response within us, drawing us closer to touch and confirm their textures. Indeed, paralleling the way we are dragged into a timeless digital world through the surface of our phones. Timelessness and the illusory preoccupies Bliss' subject matter too. The orifice structure of Orbital Gulp combines the shapes of navigation buoys with siren mythology. Despite not being able to read the language of navigation systems, Bliss was interested that we still understand buoys as boundary objects that demarcate one space from another. Communication, specifically deceptive communication, is also at the heart of siren mythology, and Bliss creates in the centre of her structure an orifice form akin to an open siren's mouth. The ominous enticement of the siren's song, leading those who would hear it to their deaths, offers a starker example of being sucked into an all-consuming force. Making us ask, what will it take for us to emerge out of these caves, or doomed tunnels of consumption?
Similarly to how Bliss uses the physical act of creating work to experience a ‘non-being mode’, Sophie Goodchild’s process of creating work always involves a heavy hands on approach, usually building up layers, ground and textures fast, working with and against the chosen material. The artist celebrates the role of craft in art history, and is particularly interested in the use of repetition in craft history. Craft has been marginalised for a long time, labeled as an activity for women and thus, not taken seriously, left to stay in its own cave and to not interact with the external artistic world.The Immortal Bottom Dweller depict the artist’s interest into methods of preservation and protection through the use of clay and process of firing, embracing the huge risk of unpredictability of the elements. The work is also influenced by the artist’s research in how we as humans, as well as the non-human in society, gravitate towards and need aspects of security, comfort and variables of the haptic for example- the physicality of touch to grow, develop and continue to exist.
Made in the peak of the pandemic, Azeri Aghayeva's prints developed from heightened periods of film-watching. Like many of our contemporary attention spans, her focus lapsed while watching, moving from screen to drawing on the side, and back again. A cinematic lens inadvertently entered her work, leaking out from the enclosed universe of a film. Within the enclosed universe of lockdown, the model who appears in both her prints and her painting was the only person she would see during this period. This pattern of working and seeing only one person has parallels with obsession, which is insular, vortex-like: an act of constantly searching for satisfaction from an entity, but never truly achieving it. The obsession of depicting the same image over and over again, as well as the enclosed universe of watching films in the background are similar in their way of immersing audiences and engaging them with the main character of the story.
The exhibition Saxifrage goes beyond the gallery space: it also includes an intimate reading corner, inviting visitors to spend time with the books that influenced the concept of the show, and it features works one can find in our office, kitchen and even bathroom, inviting visitors to explore Kupfer’s own cave.
