Artists: Nevena Prijic, Jade Thacker, Evian Wenyi Zhang
Exhibition title: Into, over and underneath
Venue: Public Gallery, London, UK
Date: July 5 – August 5, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Public Gallery, London
Public Gallery is pleased to present Into, over and underneath, a trio exhibition of new works by Nevena Prijic, Jade Thacker, and Evian Wenyi Zhang. The title of the exhibition, borrowed from a
2021 work by Harminder Judge, gestures towards a common concern for patterns of interconnection, repetition, and visual elasticity that encourage the persistent return of the viewer’s gaze to the painting’s surface. Enacting a defensive camouflage against the autonomy of vision and instantaneous interpretation, these three artists share characteristics that foreground ambiguity over certainty, elusiveness over mimicry, and yet precision in the physiological act of seeing. In this exhibition, the constitutive asymmetries that scaffold what we see and what exists become exceedingly transparent, taking the legibility of painting as a site of contestable ground.
Nevena Prijic’s biomorphic compositions are at once insectoid, botanical, humanoid, and cyborg, depicting a futuristic universal body inspired in part by artefacts of the Neolithic Vinča culture of present-day Serbia. Her formal language emerges where the technological and organic meet, marked by solid planes of colour onto which the artist applies feathery lines and granular gestures that exploit the viewer’s ability for amodal completion. In We Were / Now / Coming Together (2023), Prijic’s largest work to date, bulbous interlocking forms rhythmically swell and pool along webs of crystalline matrices. Cocoon-like structures at times coil and cling to the surface, and at others appear to float above the canvas itself, teasing expansive weightlessness. The momentary recognition of an arthropod’s appendage or a jellyfish’s tentacle are again made foreign by the glittering vibrancy of her palette, allowing Prijic’s multi-layered compositions to continually reveal themselves in a prolonged act of becoming.
The subtle ambiguities of expressing physical discomfort and intense pleasure are taken up in Jade Thacker’s work, whose unresolved compositions equally challenge voyeuristic consumption. Thacker’s diaristic constructions tackle the nuanced experience of womanhood with a sophisticated compositional balance that brings new figures into focus with each observation. Oftentimes Thacker uses text to interrupt her layered compositions – these linguistic cues such as ‘carefree’ are juxtaposed with pained expressions and forced smiles, placing the viewer into a precariously incompatible and unoccupiable space of constant renegotiation. Thacker’s visible mark-making situates her subjects in spaces of architectural ambiguity; the viewer’s proximity to the subject shuffles between intimately linked and melancholically distant. By collapsing the ground against the subjects presented, the viewer is doubly positioned to interrogate these shades of emotionally potent between spaces.
Evian Wenyi Zhang’s paintings emerge from a discrete approach to the harmonious aggregation and rearrangement of visual indexes in an act of practised saccade. Each miniature canvas represents a transient visual fixation point, disentangling what she identifies as “areas of interest” within the visual surface. Her source images are extracted from multi-mediated reference material, such as a screenshot of an alarm clock from a late 80s Austrian film, as in A Visit from Satan (2023). Elemental repetition and the grid reference both the modernist canvas and the digital screen; the composite result is made up of constituent cells that read both organic and architectural, advancing a distinctive pictorial idealism that simultaneously aestheticises the cognitive work performed between the eye and the mind. Zhang’s tabulated output inherently cultivates an aesthetic sensibility, a visual stutter of data accumulation, purposefully oblique yet maintaining a semiotic integrity that subverts the visual prejudice of the exacting gaze in its very uniformity. At its core, Zhang’s work is a study of image making; it is not an exercise in fragmentation or synthesis; rather, it engenders a sophisticated sensorial response to the de-accelerated process of mediated visual information design.
Nevena Prijic (b. 1985, Belgrade, Serbia) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA. She earned her BFA and MFA in Painting from The University of Novi Sad, Academy of Fine Arts, Serbia. Solo exhibitions include Mrs. Gallery, Queens, New York, USA (2023) (forthcoming); Skin of the Sun, M+B (2022), Los Angeles, USA; Common Pulses, BOZOMAG, Pasadena, USA (2022); and The Overview Effect, Gallery ALSP, Los Angeles, USA (2021). Recent institutional projects include a group show at the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida, USA (2023) and a site-specific mural for the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, USA (forthcoming).
Jade Thacker (b. 1991, Boston, Massachusetts, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA. Solo exhibitions include Radical Privacy Star, Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York, USA (2021); and Embarrassment Safe Word, Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York, USA (2020). Selected group exhibitions include Now I am a lake, Public Gallery, London, UK (2022); Lost In a Spectacle, Curated by Saša Bogojev, WOAW Gallery, Beijing, China (2022); and Towards a More Beautiful Oblivion, Fredericks & Freiser, New York, USA (2021). Her works are included in institutional collections including the Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, China.
Evian Wenyi Zhang (b. 2000, Shanghai) lives and works in Shanghai and New York. She is currently pursuing a BA in Art History at New York University. Solo exhibitions include Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, US (2024) (forthcoming); Flight Girls, skeleton and vampire bug, Lulu by X Museum, Mexico City, Mexico (2022). Selected group exhibitions include Plastic Stars, Tara Downs, New York, USA (2023); Beijing Biennial, Beijing, China; We Borrow Dreams from Others, Like Debt, MadeIn Art Center, Shanghai, China (2022); USB Multi-port Linking Exhibition, MadeIn Gallery x In The Park store, Shanghai, China (2021). Her work belongs to the permanent institutional collections of the How Art Museum, Shanghai, China; M Woods Collection, Beijing, China; and X Museum, Beijing, China.
