Artist: Ser Serpas
Exhibition title: Monakhos
Venue: LC Queisser, Tbilisi, Georgia
Date: July 16 – September 4, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and LC Queisser
Note: Press release is available here
Monakhos (Greek: μοναχός ‘solitary’) is the title of the upcoming solo exhibition of Ser Serpas at LC Queisser. Ser Serpas (b. 1995, based in Paris), as a multimedia artist, assembles installations utilizing sculpture, painting, drawing, and poetry. Concerned with the physical matter of the body and its ephemeral notions, she subjects them to sculptural altering and vice-versa, channeling the sense of body when dealing with the sculpture. Serpas’ practice transcends various mediums while maintaining the axial awareness of physicality, fragmentation, artificial assemblance, and the artist’s autonomy in alteration. Meanwhile, she’s been continually moving between multiple cities, from Zurich to Los Angeles, Tbilisi, and Paris, in the chronic state of motion and relocation, the principal condition that prompted her poetry book Guesthouse, and is furthermore emphasized in her use of materials in large-scale sculptures, always collected off the streets of a particular location. Monakhos becomes a contrary meditation of artistic solitude and unprovoked stillness. Featured in the show are her generously textured oil paintings on unstretched canvas, produced in voluntary isolation in the studio, while she religiously listened to podcasts and audiobooks on life in the ancient world and the Hebrew bible. Conventional to her previous painting series’, the faceless body motif is maintained in her new works, only here do the reference images become anonymous, but public before & after images of plastic surgery patients found on the internet constitute the majority of them, rather than the private photographs from her intimate interactions. The fragility of a passing moment and its unretrievable qualities are brought to the foreground in the portrayal of the indistinct body parts in the medial phase of the sculpting process. The tender aspect of exposing a subject to a permanent change becomes evident in the specific intermediary moment in time, space and memory. Similar to her sculptures, where ‘annexed’ constituents never become indelibly conjoined, the condition of painted bodies remains fluid and frictionless. Carnal paintings, oversaturated in color, awkwardly position the soft-modeled viscous bodies in front of a somewhat sterile background in a statuary manner. Depictions of partly-smudged, unidentifiable figures with indistinctive features become almost heroic portraits radiating with stoic relief.
-Gvantsa Jgushia
Ser Serpas’ recent solo exhibitions include HEAD BANGER BOOGIE, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2022); Ser Serpas, Balice Hertling, St Martin + Gravilliers, Paris (2021); Ser Serpas and Elene Chantladze, Conceptual Fine Arts, Milan (2021); Guesthouse, LC Queisser, Tbilisi (2021); Two Take Red Series, Karma International, Zurich (2021); Models, Karma International, Zurich (2020); Against Attachment, Ludlow 38, New York (2019); what we need is another body, Truth and Consequences, Geneva (2019) Stars are Blind, (with Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi), LC Queisser, Tbilisi (2019). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Genève (2022); Maxwell Graham / Essex Street, New York (2022); Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris (2021); Progetto, Lecce (2021); Oxygen Biennial, Tbilisi (2021); Progetto, Lecce (2021); Jenny’s, New York (2021); Palazzo Tamborino Cezzi, Lecce (2021); CUADRO22, Chur (2020); Kevin Space, Vienna (2020); Karma International, Zurich (2020); Arcadia Missa, London (2020); Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2021); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2020); Punta della Dogana, Venice (2020); Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2019).
