The Creatures On My Mind: Group exhibition - Jean-Marie Appriou, Laurent Proux, Matthias Bitzer, Liang Fu, Elizabeth Glaessner, Marc Henry, Melike Kara, Jeanette Mundt, Laure Prouvost, Nadine Schemmann

Request preview 

 

Particapating artists: Jean-Marie Appriou, Matthias Bitzer, Liang Fu, Elizabeth Glaessner, Marc Henry, Melike Kara, Jeanette Mundt, Laure Prouvost, Laurent Proux, and Nadine Schemmann

Curated by Jesi Khadivi

 

A creature is a multiplicity, a dynamic system of relations, flows, and mutations. It is a becoming, always in the process of transformation. The group exhibition The Creatures on My Mind does not explore the notion of the "creature" in a literal sense but as a multivalent cipher to observe artistic reflections on myth, memory, dreams, and metamorphosis. Spanning different material and conceptual approaches, the works share an openness born of interstitial spaces: between abstraction and figuration, the production and consumption of images, the historic and the contemporary-and between one moment, one impression, one sensation, and another. 

 

The initial impulse for the exhibition was inspired by a text by Ursula K. Le Guin in which she obliquely positions the creature metaphor for creative practice: a sort of mediator between interior and exterior worlds. "My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool," she writes, "it gives me all the world and exiles me from it." This notion of being between worlds, of being at once at home in one's skin and alien to it, runs throughout the exhibition. TA creature is a multiplicity, a dynamic system of relations, flows, and mutations. It is a becoming, always in the process of transformation. The group exhibition The Creatures on My Mind does not explore the notion of the "creature" in a literal sense but as a multivalent cipher to observe artistic reflections on myth, memory, dreams, and metamorphosis. Spanning different material and conceptual approaches, the works share an openness born of interstitial spaces: between abstraction and figuration, the production and consumption of images, the historic and the contemporary-and between one moment, one impression, one sensation, and another.

 

The Creatures on My Mind is conceived as an immersive experience structured around moments of reflection, refraction, and dislocation. Elizabeth Glaessner's painting Floating Island, Sinking Head (2024) depicts a partially submerged figure gracefully arching her body into an expanse of greenish-blue liquid. Water, both as a mirror and barrier, functions as a metaphorical threshold in Glaessner's works: between dream and reality, id and ego, this world and the next. In Laure Prouvost's Mirror Painting, A Story of Reflection, Blinded, a landscape painted on a metal shelf is reflected in an angled mirror. Installed above eye level and visible only as a reflected fragment, the work resembles a blazing sun, a sunflower, or even an eye. This interplay between visibility and fragmentation "complicates our reality," as Prouvost notes, allowing us to "experience other points of view and situations."

 

In Jean-Marie Appriou's works, linear time seems to collapse in an uneasy state of suspension. Drawing from mythology, science fiction, and cinema, Appriou conceives of his sculptures as "time travelers," gateways to other dimensions where post-human and sentient creatures intermingle. Marc Henry, by contrast, explores the tension between human intention and machine unpredictability. His painting The Sphinx and the Pyramid Scheme reflects a sophisticated dialogue with AI-generated images, which function like visual "riddles" that Henry decodes and reconstructs. Just as the sphinx in myth presents challenges to be solved, Henry's process raises questions of authorship, interpretation, and the future of human-machine collaboration. Matthias Bitzer begins his mirror paintings by pouring airbrush colors directly onto a wet canvas and moving them as the pigment spreads, creating spontaneous interactions. The initial process results in two distinct paintings, which he develops in dialogue with each other. This infinitely looping mode of working carries over into the viewing experience, which generates a continuous back-and-forth between the visible and the hidden, cultivating a space that holds a foggy mirror to our consciousness: a spontaneous, organic, moldable, infinite, simultaneous, and constantly expanding tangle of perceptions and sensations. Liang Fu's paintings exert a strong dreamlike presence. The forms in Aura seem to emerge and dissolve, existing in a liminal space between presence and absence, creation and destruction that gives the feeling of being underwater or bathed in starlight. Inspired by the fluidity of human interaction, Nadine Schemann's paintings capture memories of distinct moments, conversations, and encounters in colors that seep, blend, and dissolve into one another, evoking the impermanence and interconnectedness of lived experiences. Melike Kara draws inspiration from her large-scale gestural paintings from traditional Kurdish tapestries. These tapestry patterns are not literally reflected in the motifs of her paintings but instead, serve as the impetus for a distinct new formal language that absorbs and metabolizes cultural heritage and memory.

 

Jeanette Mundt's painting Excessively Emotional and Lusty depicts a female figure subsumed beneath a wild accumulation of flowers. Mundt uses the pictorial construction of space and flowers-which she describes as taking her into a "trancelike space" where she can "just let go"-as motifs to work through the disciplining of women's bodies, who, as the feminist scholar Silvia Federici writes, were considered "emotionally excessive and lusty, unable to govern themselves." The protagonists of Laurent Proux's I'd Put You in the Mirror inhabit a dreamlike, light-drenched landscape where figures meld into one another and the surrounding elements. This ethereal blending embodies the idea that reality itself resists crystallization, echoing the exhibition's exploration of how interstitial spaces and moments shape our experiences and perceptions.