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
Into My Arms
Sonya Derviz, My-Lan Hoang-Thuy, Shamiran Istifan and Li Li Ren
Sherbet Green, London
19th January – 4th March 2023
Inside Out
Sophie Mei Birkin, Max Boyla, Sonya Derviz, Antoine Leisure, Kin-Ting Li, Ding Shilun and Scott Young
The Artist Room, London
10th March – 2nd April 2022
Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers, Altered States, 2021
The Artist Room is pleased to present Inside Out, a group exhibition including works by Sophie Mei Birkin, Max Boyla, Sonya Derviz, Antoine Leisure, Kin-Ting Li, Ding Shilun and Scott Young.
This exhibition explores how a dystopian consciousness permeates contemporary art. From subverting the so-called ‘natural’ to envisioning surreal cosmologies and carnal futures, this exhibition brings together a group of emerging artists that imagine life turned inside out. By rendering visible the imagined, unseen and yet felt, a new generation of artists are responding to our hyper-transient and image-centric age by building new visual languages to form alternative paths to perception.
‘When the difference between real and unreal is so blurred, where does that leave our sense of being in the world?’ asks Max Boyla (b.1991). Boyla’s evolving project – spanning painting, sculpture and installation – constructs speculative and supernatural worlds in which fiction and truth, the past and the future collide. Recurrent characters, both ambiguous and celestial, seek to imagine ‘how the human soul exists within concepts of infinity.’
Sculptor Sophie Mei Birkin (b.1995) explores the ‘generative potential in the transformation of matter.’ Working with diverse mediums such as jesmonite, acrylic, abalone shells, ceramic and glass, Birkin’s fragmentary installations investigate how material exploration can incite a psychophysical response. Appearing simultaneously futuristic and prehistoric, Carcass Submerged [Whale Fall] (2021–22) draws from an ‘interest in the seabed as a site of protean transformation.’ Whether in the context of post-apocalypse or environmental disaster, when one carcass falls, what new ecosystems are created?
Although recognisable, the figures present in Sonya Derviz’s (b.1994) works are mined from the subconscious. Untitled (2022), from the Wise Young Girl series, continues the artist’s investigations into unspoken behaviours and the human psyche. Beginning with a research process involving the careful collection of source material, Derviz is interested in abstracting such information through the physical act of painting. ‘There is a difference between conceiving and realising a painting, because in the end, a painting is not an idea,’ she once noted, describing her intuitive approach. In this vein, her paintings – that evoke notions of isolation and abandonment – are worked and re-worked; their final appearance subliminally connecting images with sensations and memories.
Similarly, Kin-Ting Li’s (b.1991) paintings traverse fiction and reality. The gestural and seemingly abstract shapes that are visible mimic organic structures; it is unclear whether they represent micro-scale workings internal to the body or astronomical happenings beyond our universe. Li employs a distinctive palette of chilling and otherworldly tones – charcoals, silvers, petrol blues and lime greens – and his works, which hold a distinctively rough surface texture, have been described as ‘protean renderings’.
Synthesising aesthetics of abstraction, graffiti and illustration, Paris-based artist Antoine Leisure (b.1993) envisions dramatic vistas and vivid, entropic landscapes. Utilising acrylic and airbrush techniques gleaned from painting inside and outside the studio confines, Leisure’s luminescent paintings, such as Shinji (2022), appear at once lucid and hazy. Functioning like worlds within worlds, Leisure’s paintings read as transient non-spaces and somehow other: disturbing, incompatible, contradictory and transforming.
Scott Young (b.1988) is interested in the strange and uncanny relationships we project on objects and possessions. His hyperreal paintings are a contemporary re-envisioning of Dutch still life and vanitas painting, where objects and motifs with contentious social significance are carefully placed into coded dialogues. In Still Life with California Corn (2021), a genetically modified corn husk – the most produced crop in the USA – sits atop a faux Yellow Siena marble background, alluding to artificialities in our extractive relationship between nature and culture.
The fantastical – and somewhat paranormal – paintings of Ding Shilun (b.1998) imagine scenes that sit outside of any clear, linear history. Chiron (2021), for instance, voyeuristically depicts two mysterious figures intertwined in a carnal and intense embrace. Ding considers such characters to be an embodiment of the conflicting sensibilities and vulnerabilities we, as individuals, hold. Both captivating and beguiling, he has described his layered works as ‘impossible miracles’.
Inside Out brings together strands of dystopian thinking; from the rendering of altered states and unsettling worlds to harnessing intuition and embracing the subconscious. Bringing together a new generation of artists whose work – in different ways – captures the pathos complexity of feelings that underlie our anxious time, Inside Out is an exhibition about the transformative potential of art; where ideas and aesthetics can both coalesce and rupture.
Photography by Shen Tan
Pathways on Paper
South Parade, London
27th January – 28th February, 2022
South Parade presents Pathways on Paper: In aid of Maggie’s - “everyone’s home of cancer care”, an exhibition of works on paper by over 50 contemporary artists, with 25% of all sales going to the charity. Maggie’s has a network of drop-in centres across the UK, which help anyone who has been affected by cancer. They provide a caring environment that can provide support, information and practical advice.