Various Others 2024 Berlinde De Bruyckere, Jenny Holzer, James Lewis, Emanuel de Carvalho hosting Gathering, London

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• Exhibition text (EN)

  In collaboration with Gathering, Nir Altman is pleased to present Transferring domain featuring works by Berlinde De Bruyckere, Emanuel de Carvalho, Jenny Holzer and James Lewis.

  At the core of the artists’ practices is an interrogation of the empirical boundaries which determine our understanding of the relationships between humans, natural world and objects, and confine our experiences of a given environment. The fallacy of statistical language and quantification is overturned, instead displaying how disorder and chaos erode and shape reality.

  James Lewis’ sculptures rendered in layers of painted concrete and sound pieces are reactions to the cognitive dissonance that fills our quotidian lives, as social and political complexities have been increasingly reduced to statistical data, measurements of time, percentiles, and performance standards. Similarly, de Carvalho’s painting form lack depicts an abandoned, withering waiting room, the purposeful use of unusual orientations inducing a sense of unease in the viewer. De Carvalho holds a PhD in Medicine from the University of Amsterdam and has been a practicing ophthalmologist for years specialising in neurological origins of perceptive disorders. Throughout his practice, he passes on his medical knowledge into the language of painting, simultaneously specifically investigating the environments requiring a unique code of conduct (waiting rooms, lecture halls, hospital settings), where the transfer of knowledge takes place.

  In Berlinde De Bruyckere fragile collaged drawings, the suffering anthropomorphic form attests to the overwhelming power of nature. ‘I want to show how helpless a body can be,’ the artist has said. ‘Which is nothing you have to be afraid of—it can be something beautiful.’ De Bruyckere is profoundly influenced by traditions of the Flemish Renaissance, drawing from the legacies of the European Old Masters and Christian iconography, which are also recalled in de Carvalho’s document lack III, a study on askesis, the subtle, undefined characteristics of the sitter recalling self-discipline and asceticism. Painted on a pumice-primed canvas requiring dozens of layers to be applied over a period of time, document lack III investigates the history of the medium of painting.

  Jenny Holzer began writing, compiling, and self-publishing pithy statements in 1977. Truisms: All things are delicately interconnected (2015) conjures the feeling of a grave or a monument, and Holzer’s text lands with the gravity of a tombstone. Yet the compact monument does not commemorate the dead, but addresses the pitfalls and promises of language: how words convey meaning, what they can obscure, and the ways in which materiality and context inform how particular phrases are read and understood.

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