Gabriele Beveridge at L21 Gallery

L21 Gallery announces with great excitement the first solo exhibition in Spain of Gabriele Beveridge in Room 2 at S’Escorxador.

In this exhibition, entitled “Stem2, there is a certain air of the laboratory. The artist presents glass sculptures, photograms and a painting on steel shop-fittings: a variety of techniques that she has been scrupulously experimenting with over the last few years.

Her works embody a long process of research, of waiting and slow observation, trial and error, a clear initial question, and unexpected results. Beveridge proposes to name without enveloping: she exhibits what she has found in her experimental practice, without covering it with rhetoric, without renouncing to transparency.

This exhibition is dominated by glass, a material that the artist has been exploring intensively for the last ten years, whose link with cosmetics is emblematic, almost foundational. In fact, among the earliest surviving glass artefacts from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt are small glass jars used to contain oils and perfumes.

One sculpture in this exhibition references a series of internal organs (perhaps ventricles or livers) stacked one on top of the other, emerging from what looks like a spinal column. Both the forms and the colour seem to sprout from the centre, from a fragile and meagre yet decisive stem, like the leaves of a tree that are nourished and grow from a slight, linear and uncertain structure.

On the walls of the gallery, we find photograms whose circular and concentric objects vaguely resemble eyes. These are photographic images made without a camera, placing an object directly on the photosensitive paper and chemically processing this encounter to stabilise it. Instinctively, they evoke bulbs, abstract images whose shapes, human organs or replicas might be available to an improved body, like prostheses. The photograms suggest to me sequences from Blade Runner, especially that of Mr Chew’s laboratory. In general, this exhibition has a futuristic atmosphere typical of a certain dystopian science fiction.

The largest work in the exhibition consists of a number of steel panels commonly used in shops to hang products for sale. Beveridge now uses them as supports for her paintings, suspended on a landscape of colour without limits. She does not specify which landscape it is, although the tones might refer to a sunset or a sunrise, or moments of flux and change. Uniform bands of warm colours, reminiscent of Agnes Martin’s paintings are now removed from the technique and asceticism of the American artist, as if Gabriele Beveridge transported the iconography of the New Mexico desert to the chaos of London.

In one glass sculpture, which rests on a mirrored base, transparency reflects and multiplies open, experimental questions. The viewer stares at something that continually escapes. The gaze glides over the glass surfaces like a cotton glove that moves along the sinuous material, without leaving any evidence of its passage. The gaze leaves no trace on what it runs over…

These are organic forms, but not quite human, not humans anymore. Perhaps because there is an evident weariness of being human, a dissatisfaction whose exhausted consciousness makes us want to be stones in the field.

“Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.” – Don DeLillo, Point Omega

A sequence that does not add up, with no end in sight, that only asks to continue sprouting its imperfect elements; we see serums in its interior, dark red ink, like an oil or a perfume whose containers will await them until the arrival of the future to which they belong. A laboratory of the ineffable, with the illusion that nothing will happen there, that no one will be stained or corrupted, for now, not yet.