Phantasmagoria

5 April - 4 May, 2024

Featuring: Caroline Absher, Grace Bromley, Connie Harrison, Cheung Tsz Hin, Antonia Caicedo Holguín, Yowshien Kuo, Jack McGarrity, Fabian Ramírez, Kristian Touborg, Jiajia Wang, Kate Pincus-Whitney, Tianyue Zhong.

I seize the sphery harp. I strike the strings.

At the first sound the golden sun arises from the deep...

The echo wakes the moon to unbind her silver locks,

The golden sun bears on my song

And nine bright spheres of harmony rise round the fiery king . . .

WILLIAM BLAKE, ‘Enitharmon Revives with Los’

The etymology of the word ‘phantasmagoria’ stems from phántasma (“ghost”) + agorá (“assembly”). A gathering of spectres. Many of the works on display in the present exhibition, by artists working across three continents, bear the traces of the past’s incisive presence, and of successive breakthroughs in art history reimagined anew, like ghosts in our own time. ‘Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious’, wrote Nobel Laureate Louise Glück, and ‘because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted.’ The artists assembled here paint like Glück’s brief for the poet. These works are at once clear and mysterious, truthful yet arcane. In their eclecticism of forms, the gathered paintings oscillate between figurative imaginings of leisurely landscapes and idle objects, sonorous distributions of abstract paint, and the human body trapped in liminal spaces between dreamscapes and waking life. Spurred the imaginative power William Blake expressed in his ‘prophetic books’, according to which the texture of dreams was not mere fantasy but an essential part of life, this group of artists address the world of forms that meet at the threshold between the cold light of experience and the wildness of dreams.

– Matthew James Holman

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