Sorores Liquidae
Apollinaria Broche, Carlotta Bailly-Borg, Cathleen Clarke, Sonya Derviz, Chantal Khoury, Bregje Sliepenbeek
CARVALHO, New York
26th June – 8th August, 2026
Greco-Roman mythology abounds with metamorphoses, divine interventions fueled by sensuality and violence that see women becoming animals, inanimate objects, waterways, and trees. There is brutality and terror in this treatment of women’s bodies, but, paradoxically, for those willing to see beyond the coercion involved in these irreverent couplings, there are also intimations of freedom. The gendered body might be shed, transcended, and granted access to different skills, powers, and pleasures. The artists in this exhibition draw out the liberatory potential of classical myth: the female body is not a pliant substance that must surrender itself to more powerful forces, but is a frame within which a multi-layered, dynamic subjectivity flourishes. The boundaries between self and other are recomposed, and what emerges is an experimental, self-questioning form of femininity that defies containment and categorization. Challenging its oppressive associations with social and sexual discipline, femininity is, across these works, reconfigured as a horizon of possibility.
In Bailly-Borg’s Spume, fragmentary silhouettes of limbs and heads appear like bits of seaweed churned through the foam of the title, as though summoned through pareidolia, faces and bodies surfacing momentarily from shifting fields of light and shadow. Femininity is subtly invoked through color and atmosphere, not through the body, which is continually making and unmaking itself, enjoying its sudden weightlessness and limitlessness. Beauty is irrelevant in a world in which appearance is so mutable. Instead, bodily presence is privileged, the satisfying curves of hands, knees and noses and, more obliquely, through experiments in gesture – open-palmed hands, a mouth sucking on a toe – the unexpected sites and fruits of intersubjectivity. In Glimpses, this preoccupation is made more explicit. Three ambiguously gendered figures are housed in adjoining tanks, clearly communing with one another (though not in ways immediately recognizable to us) and they are fluid, sinuous, bulbous, more like spirits or nymphs, free of the dreary constraints of ordinary human mortality and morality.
Other artists depict water as a metaphorical material that cultivates unbounded, (re)generative states of being. Across histories and cultures, water has been associated with femininity (often in ways destructive to women) and this association, and a desire to renew its terms, is a latent though powerful component of many of these works. In Tension and Attraction, Broche juxtaposes the delicacy of her subject matter, plants, with the enduring strength of medium, bronze. Figurally-scaled and suspended between botanical specimen and bodily presence, the sculptures recall sea algae, their undulating forms seemingly shaped by the weight and movement of water rather than air. Strands of pearls thread through the composition like a trail of ascending bubbles, lending radiant form to an otherwise fleeting phenomenon. Broche subtly reimagines the symbolism of water (and by implication, femininity) not as passive or yielding, but as adaptive and quietly powerful.
Color cascades down the canvas as though everything were submerged in water in Khoury’s Between Folds and Daydreaming. Forms recede and dissipate; they ripple and drip and are dragged by gravity. These paintings embrace spillage and dissolution, finding in loosened boundaries the unforeseen rewards of ceding control, letting the edges of ourselves and our environments soften and blur. What this might lead to is a mobility and multiplicity more freeing than the transformations imagined by mythological tradition. Steeds brings to mind the story of Diana and Actaeon, repeatedly reimagined across the history of art, in which the lascivious young hunter is turned into a stag. However, in Khoury’s rendition of the myth, the focus is on the ecstatic movement of the animal. Flowing brushstrokes convey the sensation of air rushing over the horses’ galloping haunches, blurred forms visualize speed, and flashes of brightness telegraph heat, all of which encourages us to consider how it would feel to inhabit that radically different physicality. Derviz’s Grey Water uses a cropped and flattened picture plane to trouble the distinction between figuration and abstraction, and to unsettle the spectator’s perspective, who cannot resolve where she is – and perhaps who she is – in relation to this body of water. In these works, water is about union and connection with heterogenous states and objects; it is inclusive, immersive and unassailable. If these water metaphors have a united vision of femininity, then it is as a transitional state that incubates imaginative undoings and becomings of the self.
For Derviz, Sliepenbeek, and Clarke, other elements – air and earth – are grounds for similar thinking about femininity and the mutability of selves. Sliepenbeek’s Closing Flowers at Night uses layered and woven metal to erect a semi-transparent arch that appears to float, and resembles a threshold to another order of reality. Where would this gateway take us, and what would we become? With their engulfing and shifting light and shadow, Derviz’s paintings are charged meteorological atmospheres, not quite of this world, and the questions they pose are equally metaphysical. Indeed, Sliepenbeek’s mystical architecture shares its heightened spiritual energy with Derviz’s Vapour and Pluto, paintings that operate as portals into unseen registers of existence, as commonplace and essential as the air we breathe, as inconceivable as planets far off in the cosmos.
Clarke’s Valley of Dreams shows a sky lit up by lush colors that might be aurora borealis, beneath which a group of reclining women resemble an undulating mountainous landscape. This cosmic phenomenon comes about through atoms and molecules colliding with particles from the sun, a process scientists call ‘excitation,’ and which, in Clarke’s handling, becomes analogous for the central figures’ thinking and dreaming. Clarke turns the inward, obscure drama of women’s subjectivity into a spectacle with a culturally accepted beauty and importance. Her works on paper extend this analogy further, and blend human figures with an irrepressible luminosity, a reminder that human bodies share with the aurora borealis the same fundamental particles: ionized atoms of oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. By revealing this affinity, Clarke give us permission to perceive ourselves as equally – thrillingly – shifting and unfixed.
The mythological corpus is energized by shocking transformations with allegorical connotations intended to punish and humiliate women for their vulnerability to male violence. The chorus of artists assembled by this exhibition have reconfigured this tradition to reparative ends. These artists emphasize the expansive, freeing qualities of metamorphosis as a feminine strategy of self-(re)discovery that opposes the historically limiting aspects of femininity. Together, their works imagine femininity as a flexible, creative way of being that exists in a perpetual state of becoming. Their wild, expansive visions insist that neither our bodies nor the selves they house are static, biological things. We are a dynamic play of processes and forces, comparable to water, weather systems, and cosmic light shows, and we are left with a sense that these electrifying, transgressive metaphors still only capture a fraction of our multitudes.
Essay by Rebecca Birrell, PhD
Hover
Solo show
Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal
22nd January – 7th March, 2026
Bradley Ertaskiran is delighted to present Hover, a solo exhibition by London-based artist Sonya Derviz, featuring a new body of paintings that embrace the potential of uncertainty.
At first glance, Derviz’s amorphous abstractions appear effortless and unstructured, as if conjured out of thin air. Yet their captivating ethereality—the result of countless overlaid traces—reveals a laborious and strategic method that doesn’t make visibility its priority. Reference images are intuitively assembled as quiet guides for the overall composition, chosen not for their representational clarity but for their ability to ignite a scene before receding from view. The paintings’ underpinnings are also charted in charcoal, only to be concealed by the painting’s completion. Over this, Derviz develops layer upon layer of semitransparent oil paint, building unbound worlds in painted form. The accumulation of these translucent surfaces both structures the painting and leaves room for chance encounters. From this shifting ground emerge weighty masses and wispy shadows—forms that appear to mutate in response to their surroundings. Derviz masters a range of atmospheric effects, producing a disorienting coexistence of heaviness and air.
In a moment that privileges the hyper-visible—when overly-saturated images proliferate endlessly, collapsing distinctions between the real and the fabricated—Derviz’s paintings affirm the value of what remains unseen. Painting has long been a vehicle for illusion, yet here, illusion is not a spectacle of deception but a slow, attentive process that cultivates productive, poetic uncertainty, about both what we see and how we inhabit the world. Faces and figures hover on the brink of recognition. Is a face still a face when it is untethered to a known identity? Derviz’s scenes do not provide answers; in refusing the comfort of precision and legibility, and prioritizing opacity over exposure, the work questions the assumption that visibility equates to truth, suggesting instead that ambiguity offers space for reflection, attentiveness, and wonder.
Derviz’s hazy scenes are steeped in both suspicion and curiosity, as if something is unfolding just beyond our immediate view. Confronted with this state of not-knowing—of not-seeing—we experience discomfort; we yearn for clarity, to sift through the gauzy film for something direct and uncomplicated to hold onto. Yet the paintings’ lack of guidance is bewildering and ultimately humbling, a reminder that precision and coherence are not irrefutable indicators of reality. Derviz creates works that reward sustained looking, particularly for those willing to search without knowing exactly what they are looking for.
Photography by Jean-Michael Seminaro
Sonya Derviz at Bradley Ertaskiran, Floorr Magazine Issue 37
Interview by Richard Starbuck,
March 2026
“UNCERTAINTY IS WHAT ALLOWS THE WORK TO
MOVE; WITHOUT IT, A PAINTING CAN ONLY ARRIVE
WHERE YOU ALREADY EXPECTED IT TO.”
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background?
I was born in Moscow and grew up mostly in the UK, finally choosing to stay in London. I started painting when I was four or five years old; around then I began going to art school in Moscow, which focused mostly on drawing, gouache paintings of still lifes and illustrations of mostly Eastern European fairy tales. I started working with oil a bit later, and at the Slade I abandoned painting completely for a few years in favour of sculpture and photography. I came back to it toward the end of my studies, but differently. It felt like starting again.
In your solo exhibition Hover at Bradley Ertaskiran, the paintings seem to embrace uncertainty rather than resolve it. What does “hovering” mean to you in the context of this body of work, emotionally, psychologically, or even physically?
"Hovering" refers to a suspended state, something held in relation to laws or structures. If something is suspended, there must be something to be suspended from. Hovering can be both passive and active, conscious or unconscious. It refers to principles of uncertainty. In the paintings, charcoal lines act as anchors but thin layers of oil disrupt and collapse them; forms appear and then lose their edges. Hovering describes that condition: not fully defined, but not lost either. As a title for this show I wanted a word that could describe what the paintings do.
Uncertainty is what allows the work to move; without it, a painting can only arrive where you already expected it to. This is perhaps what makes art so connected to human experience. It is also, I think, a condition of the present moment, where foundational certainty is not just questioned but collapsing, and vagueness is not the failure of truth but perhaps its experience. This space of not knowing feels even more present to me now, when so much of how we live and our interaction with technology is shaped by the expectation of clarity and resolution. I think much of our understanding of the world depended on having a ground.
Your paintings appear atmospheric and spontaneous, yet they are built through carefully layered charcoal and semitransparent oil. How do you navigate the balance between control and chance in your process, and at what point do you decide a work has reached its final state?
One way would be that I reference external material, and I compile collections of these materials. I can use charcoal as a starting point to hint at a specific reference, which feels deliberate. Then I start working in oil, and I use charcoal outlines again and again to re-anchor the composition or to bring in a new reference, new lines, and allow things to react. There is a methodology, and then there is how I respond to these things intuitively. So the painting unfolds through layering, through seeing and not seeing. I paint very thinly, so the opacity of the paint becomes a tool, where marks and gestures settle into layers. There's always an element of chance in the physicality of it.
Many of the works in Hover suggest faces or figures on the verge of recognition, only to dissolve again into abstraction. How do you think about that tension between visibility and obscurity, and what role does the viewer play in completing or destabilising the image?
I don't think a painting can be truly current. It’s material presence gives it a different duration. There are elements I control, what is visible and what is not, but visibility and obscurity are structural in the work, not just decisions I make. What is shown is always shaped by what has been covered. A painting can suggest recognition but does not confirm it. Vagueness here is a structural condition, not a distortion.
I use references, but I don't always need them; sometimes they lead me somewhere that has nothing to do with the reference itself. References are mostly suggestive; combining things that don't fit together creates a tension between fragmentation and coherence. I think that tension is psychological as much as visual, something to do with the boundaries of what the self can hold together. In Kaari Upson's words, "Perhaps the beautiful is more so when it's not an aim but a by-product." The process shapes what the painting is, how it feels, and allows us the kind of knowledge that paintings bring — even though we cannot fully define them.
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?
I usually dedicate focused time to painting; I need to create an environment centred entirely around it. Recently, my studio has been quite empty. I don't like having anything there besides what I'm currently working on, and I no longer keep books or older works in the space. I work on one painting at a time as I don't like to divide my focus. Because I work mostly wet-on-wet, a painting has to be completed all at once, and I want to see significant change in a day's work. Sometimes I can spend a month without painting, focusing on research instead. I like working that way, led by a kind of curiosity rather than a specific idea. I collect images, read, look, all outside the studio. Somehow these activities don't sit well alongside painting; in fact, nothing really does. Painting tends to consume everything until it's finished. And each time, there is something new in how it happens.
What artwork have you seen recently that resonated with you?
I've been thinking about Sasnal, Daiga Grantina, Barbara Wesołowska's show at Michael Werner in London, Karla Black. I often return to Giacometti and Cézanne. I loved Peter Doig's show at the Serpentine, Gerhard Richter's retrospective in Paris, and Kaari Upson at the Louisiana Museum. I also often think about Auerbach's London paintings, Eugène Leroy, Manoucher Yektai, Richter's moonscapes, Mondrian's trees, Rozanova's Green Stripe.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I'm continuing to work on new paintings and will be spending a lot more time in the US next year.
Conditions
Sonya Derviz and Joel Wycherley
Soft Commodity at The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ
6th – 28th June, 2025
“Most likely.” “Quite possibly.” “I would imagine.” When we mention post-truth, we’re normally thinking about lies. But we are equally scared of vagueness. We look for something precise and reliable, but elusion and evasion leave us with little to hang our hats on.
Some think of art as a sort of crystallisation: thousands of possibilities in the form of ideas and impressions, distilled into a single image or object. The artist, a sort of alchemist, turns all that might be into something that is. The artwork stands sentinel as a definite object, an answer to the many questions that haunted its creation. Finally, solid ground.
Not here. Neither Sonya Derviz nor Joel Wycherley deal in truths. They deal in the almost-true, probably-true, maybe-true and ostensibly-true. In their work, vagueness is understood not as a distorting force but as a necessary condition of our experience of the world.
In making ambiguity a central underpinning of their work, both artists reveal the possibility of solid ground to be spurious. We seek comfort in knowledge, in the feeling that we have a reliable lay of the land. Always, to a lesser or greater extent, this is illusory. Indeed, we are at our worst when acting on the feeling that we understand something that we really don’t. Derviz and Wycherley place us into the centre of a narrative that, paradoxically, speaks truth precisely because of its lack of a declaration.
Wycherley builds physical lenses through which we glimpse a mediated version of what might lie beyond them. Sometimes a carved wood eyeball, sometimes a ripe lemon, sometimes an emptiness in disguise. Portal-like in scale and covering two opposing walls, his heavy structures seem to become architectural features of the space. Displayed as such – as conditions of the environment itself rather than discrete objects – they quietly animate the room, making it hum with the feeling that what we’re looking at might not be what it seems.
Between these pane-structures is Derviz’s painting. It contains a composite figure inspired by a number of found images but ultimately unanswerable to any of them. Her characters are constructed in the process of painting them, and therefore don’t exist outside of the paintings. This is a figment whose world extends no further than the edges of the canvas, where she hovers in a suspended state. Derviz’s intentional openness reframes ambiguity as defiant and bold; a mode of figuration that finds a truth beyond traditional ideas of representation.
The artists share an understanding of their subjects as essentially unknowable. Something is here, but exactly what is, by design, unclear. We circle it, we glimpse it occasionally, but never in a full and comprehensive form – because it doesn’t have one. Nothing is crystalised, nothing is clearly stated or conveyed; what looks like one thing could easily be its opposite. Laughter might really be tears.
Relaying little about their subjects, both artists tell us much about perception and experience itself. Each in their own way, they reflect the way that we see and understand the world back to us. When we look, it’s always through a lens of some kind, even if only the heavy gauze of our own physical hardware. When we dream or remember, we see faces that are amalgamations of those that we encounter in waking life.
These three works constitute an environment, a condition. The room that contains them is heavy with the sense that something meaningful is happening here, but not in plain sight. It’s somewhere, just around the corner, perhaps, just behind the glass, flickering in someone’s eye. It won’t present itself to us readily – but what real thing would?
– Phin Jennings
Photography by Dominique Croshaw
Derviz almost exclusively employs charcoal to make these drawings. It is among the most pictorial of drawing mediums, enabling a sheer variety of effects—ranging from precise lines to atmospheric fields—depending on the pressure applied onto the paper. Charcoal possesses both the acute delicacy of fine mechanical pencils and the painterly beauty characteristic of the ways oil paint bleeds. Charcoal demands a heightened physical engagement with the act of drawing, which often continues after the stick is set aside. The marks it leaves beg to be spread with a finger.
Derviz embraces charcoal’s corporeal dimensions and conceives of drawing almost as a recording instrument. The seemingly finished works bear the imprint of her hands’ movements across the surface, set in motion by the motifs she captures. Her drawings embody empathic networks of intuition and feeling fostered by her being in the world. Beneath the recognisable elements she renders—branches, foliage, trunks—her drawings’ fundamental subjects emerge, manifesting the interstices that escape fixed forms. Derviz uses her free and thinking hands to open the visible world, metamorphosing matter into transfigured forms, to paraphrase the French art historian Henri Focillon’s In Praise of Hands.
The four paintings Derviz presents in this exhibition translate into painting the meditative rigour of her draughtsmanship. Throughout their making, she returns repeatedly to charcoal even while working in oil, using it to find her bearings and maintain sound compositions. It is as though she incrementally transfers charcoal from paper to linen, from drawing to painting. Each layer brings her closer to the works we see now. Her constructive method reads as deconstructive: the paintings collapse the appearance of her drawings through their own pictorial means. Within the boundaries of each canvas, her charcoal additions, now buried under layers of oil paint, remain faintly visible. They activate the vibrations of Derviz’s hand-driven memories. Her movements subtly resurface through them. If her drawings gently perspire with these remembrances, it is with paint that she fully embraces them.
The paintings give form to the drawings’ roots. Derviz’s aesthetic attitude yields a pictorial realm where forms are revealed through their essence, where outlines no longer serve as primary definitions and contours become irrelevant. Her paintings daze us into a perceptual state where the world has not
yet solidified into photographic legibility, a metaphor echoed in the title of one of her works, The sun turning into water. As Kazimir Malevich writes in a text Derviz often returns to, ‘An Analysis of New and Imitative Art’, she ‘mak[es] [us] experience the reality of [her paintings] at [their] given moment [in time]’. By creating unbound forms, Derviz imbues painting itself with living perception.
— Théo de Luca
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Picturing the Animal,
Co-curated with Sonya Derviz
Sonya Derviz, Sof'ya Shpurova, Danilo Stojanovic and Evangeline Turner
Sherbet Green, London
27th September – 2nd November, 2024
“Linguistic relativity” refers to the hypothesis that a language’s structure influences a speaker’s output, an idea that, though originating in the field of linguistics, could be applied across artistic practice, as much as written and spoken language. What separates these latter outputs from visual languages is that they exist within a more controlled set of syntactic principles (illustrated by Noam Chomsky using “syntax trees”), requiring that we use words in certain orders, or in certain amalgamations, in order to be understood. Visual language does not seem bound by such rules, exemplifying that it either does not exist within human order as a purely communicative tool, or that we have yet to understand, more than vaguely, the laws of generating meaning inside of it.
Often, art is produced as a phenomenological tool, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in his Eye and Mind (Spirit) (1964), in which he explores painting as a language for mining and depicting subjective existence. This is also reflected in Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1988), a self-declared affirmation “of the reality of spirit and the reality of matter [and an attempt to determine] the relation of the one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory.” The works in this exhibition have been brought together for their shared evocation of this process of human experience. Not in the sense that they directly evoke human life, per se, but that they manifest its psyche within the direct context of painting.
There are moments of intense saturation, of movement, techniques of introversion and semi-fictitious, fragmented narratives in these paintings. Often, there is a lack of surety. A kind of paganism or philosophical mobility beset in unclean lines and powdered tones evocative of transcendentalism, but with an increased rooting in physicality. Turner’s Androgenic hair scared the small children (2024), for example, could be inferred as a kaleidoscopic rendering of tangible and illusory events surrounding childhood and adolescence, while Stojanovic’s Mystic Gestures II (2024), which could read as hands in a position of conjuring, prayer or dance, juxtaposes symbols of devotion, madness and power with colours of passion, love and deceit. Shpurova’s paintings combine scales and elements to a perhaps nostalgic or melancholic internalised narrative; the way scenarios revolve psychologically and in dreams, and Derviz projects onto and recollects memory in landscapes and facial expressions inside a cropped vitrine, reflecting the complexity of feeling within both a face and as a body moving on the earth: wildness, understanding, surprise, and acceptance. A certain uncharacterised spirit occupies each work, having been constituted and expelled as such.
Photography by Damian Griffiths
Soft Focus
Sonya Derviz, Merveille Kelekele Kelekele, Rachel Lancaster, Lyne Lapointe, Sam Lipp,
Nour Malas, Karice Mitchell, Athena Papadopoulos, Sequoia Scavullo, Adelisa Selimbašić,
Shahin Sharafaldin
and Manuel Axel Strain
Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal
11th July – 7th September, 2024
Many artworks carry with them a sense of longing, captured through brief or hazy moments. Sonya Derviz creates moody, monochrome portraits in charcoal and oil on linen. The soft contours of her reposed figures bleed into the background, while dark, drowsy eyes stare eerily out at the viewer. Pulling from archival editorial images, Karice Mitchell’s prints show glamorous snippets of skin, which with their pixelated contours build a sense of pleasure, sex, and control through concealment and intrigue. Sam Lipp uses various tools to layer oil paint on steel, creating a soft, veiled effect. The screws poking through the metal canvases combined with seductive advert-like content—here, a bare shoulder and a glossy anti-anxiety medication label—recall commercial signage, with a tinge of intimacy. Rachel Lancaster’s realistic paintings emanate a gentle glow, showing glimpses of the mundane—a collarbone, a sweater hair tucked behind an ear—like remembering a specific but fleeting detail of a person from memory.
Several artists use portraiture as a tool for personal introspection and storytelling. Adelisa Selimbašić explores views of the body through everyday scenes, often portraying ambiguous features for consumption. Her work evokes the narrative of a continuous scroll of parts rather than wholes. Manuel Axel Strain prioritizes Indigenous epistemologies through the embodied knowledge of their mother, father, siblings, cousins, aunties, uncles, nieces, nephews, grandparents and ancestors in their work. In one canvas, eyes float apart from their sitter, with fish leathers hung beneath the frame, while another depicts a classical but defiant red nude, their face shrouded by an embellished rock inspired by pictographs. Shahin Sharafaldin’s paintings feature meticulously layered brushwork in vivid tones, showing mystical people and spaces as stand-ins for love, death, and yearning. In his haunting scenes of empty interiors, for example, there is a sense of presence through absence.
In other works, the distinctions between dream and nightmare, human and supernatural, are unclear. Nour Malas’ paintings harness thick, almost bloody brushstrokes, in which swathes of bold colour and shadow seem to emulate the cavernous depths of the underworld. Superimposed textures and shapes comprise Sequoia Scavullo’s abstract paintings, and sometimes, recognizable motifs or bodies peek through, like familiar elements revealing themselves during a vivid dream.
Merveille Kelekele Kelekele’s large-scale paintings are fantastical and psychologically charged, embodied in multi-face beasts with claws, horns, and gangly limbs, mighty and mad against their acidic backdrops. Using wood, ink on paper, and other materials, Lyne Lapointe fashions magical solitary figures with collage techniques. Athena Papadopoulos’ personified mixed media sculptures are worlds unto themselves; stuffed textiles, synthetic toys, and everyday goods are assembled into tentacled creatures who seem to swallow everything before them, a rich portrait of a life told through things.
In photography, soft focus originated from a technical flaw—a lens imperfection that hindered the photographer from capturing a clear picture of their subject. Here, this lack of clarity (or inability to capture) serves as the impetus for the selection of work in this exhibition. Whether it be through evoking an actual sense of movement, absence, nostalgia, empowerment or concealment, these artworks evoke the elusive qualities that hover just beyond the frame.
Photography by Paul Litherland
Sonya Derviz and Li Li Ren presented by Sherbet Green
Art-o-rama, Marseille
30th August – 1st September, 2024
In the centre of the booth sit three works from Ren, set in bronze, volcanic sand and resin. These sculptures, which originated as reflections on the sensation of motherhood, approximate forms associated with the ocean, while also subverting them through unexpected material applications and abstractions. They speak to a desire to flatten and destabilise humanism through an amplification of the similarities, as well as the strangeness, of human and non-human existence. A fourth work, a cast stomach, is situated on the wall.
Around them sit four paintings by Derviz, whose images produce a similar friction. They are made wet-on-wet using thinned oils and embedded charcoal, which provide semi-eviscerated contours to the morphing figures, faces and landscapes that capture her interest. Focusing not on the image as a whole, but on the specific elements contained within it, she draws in and repeatedly readjusts these pictures until they dissipate into new metaphysical shapes, an intuitive artistic language that veers towards expression and emotion over linearity and fixed ideas.
Photography by Margot Montigny
Closer
Solo show
Sherbet Green, London
15 September – 28 October 2023
Shifting and layered, so often obliterated into her own dialect of soft chaos, Derviz’s compositions react to collated, ephemeral visual sources, from found drawings, illustrations, paintings and film stills. Focusing not on the image as a whole, but on the specific elements contained within it, she draws in and repeatedly readjusts these pictures until they dissipate into new metaphysical shapes. This fragmentation allows her to consider these strands as if solely visual, re-writing them into an intuitive artistic language that veers towards expression and emotion over linearity and fixed ideas.
Wrongness and wildness are central components within this praxis, in which a violence is produced through the culmination of elements not known to naturally coexist. In their intensity, they probe the visual experience of limitations and the psychological boundaries of the self. Yet these ideas remain grounded in the process of painting itself, the resultant forms directly correlated to the rhythm, action and doubt of applying paint to canvas. As she repeatedly exercises and reworks the motifs and bodies that form here, there is the sense that she moves closer to them, in their world-less guise.
Photography by Deniz Nell Guzel
Bury a Friend
Johanna Bath, Sonya Derviz, Jack Laver
and Mia Vallance
Roman Road, London
17th March – 14th April, 2023
The exhibition takes its title from an iconic single by American singer-songwriter Billie Eilish, a song written from the perspective of a monster lurking beneath her bed, in which themes of darkness, uncertainty and death unfold in a fusion of haunting melodies and dancy instrumentals. It is in, or rather, out of such tenebrous moments where this exhibition finds its inspiration, carrying the idea that life is a cycle and a dance between the darkness and the light. Drawing on the tensions between the natural and the unnatural, the known and the unknown, the displayed artworks in Bury a Friend explore moments of time, memories, the human psyche, resilience and loss, developing a visual vocabulary of mortal contemplation and reflecting on the idea of owning your darkness.
The participating artists have each been asked to select two of their artworks that represent the self and the alter ego: two beings or states that are buried within us and are constantly challenging, and at worst fighting each other in search of balance, often leaving us exhausted. The exhibition has also been scheduled on the cusp of British springtime, symbolising a moment when the air is still cold but nature is showing signs of rebirth, and when a familiar sense of awakening is upon us.
Photography by Deniz Nell Guzel