*OTHER NATURE - Group show during Frieze week
Opening at Fitzrovia Gallery during Frieze week, *OTHER NATURE brings together five artists working across painting, drawing and textile art. The exhibition questions inherited ideas about what is natural, proper or permitted in representations of bodies and identities. In the title, the asterisk occupies the place of the missing “M” in Mother Nature, transforming a familiar phrase into a question: who has been allowed to define nature on our behalf?
The exhibition explores how gender, sexuality, history and socially prescribed behaviour might be seen and imagined differently. Established visual traditions are revisited through intimate, irreverent and self-authored representations of human experience. Rather than seeking acceptance within existing conventions, *OTHER NATURE questions their claim to authority altogether: no body, identity or way of living should require permission or justification.
Across *OTHER NATURE, colour is less descriptive than transformative. Acid yellows, electric blues, saturated pinks, bruised mauves and emphatic reds lift familiar bodies and objects out of the everyday and into heightened psychological and imagined worlds. Forms remain similarly unsettled: figures overlap, double and dissolve; bodies merge with flowers; gestures accumulate in searching lines; and intimate objects become proxies for the absent body.
Lucian Freud’s assertion that “everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it’s only a chair” expands portraiture here beyond the depicted face, allowing clothing, grooming tools, flowers and domestic objects to carry histories of desire, self-fashioning and lived experience. Together, the works approach utopia not as a perfected destination, but as a series of provisional spaces: sanctuary, adventure, tenderness, ritual and transformation, where identity can remain unfinished and ordinary life can be imagined otherwise.
Kevin is one of 5 artists, alongside Roxana Halls, Curtis Holder, Casper Hong and Zach Toppin.
