In this series, familiar masterpieces are unearthed and reimagined as if pulled from the soil-weathered, tarnished, and half-remembered. Rendered in thick, earthy tones that echo the preserved but distorted beauty of bog bodies, these paintings speak less to the originals than to what may remain of them in a future where art is no longer stable.
Drawn from sources as iconic as Narcissus or The Sower, the images appear not as pristine reproductions but as relics-drifting between recognition and ruin. Their surfaces seem oxidised, decomposing, as if the process of time or technology has begun to unpick the certainty of their meaning.
The title offers a quiet warning. In literary terms, to be “grounded” is to possess a stable connection to reality; to be “ungrounded” is to risk delusion, drift, dislocation. These works float between those poles, suspended in a space where the image remains, but its power flickers.
Underlying it all is a larger question: what will art survive in the coming age of endless replication, machine vision, and mutable meaning? And what will be lost in the flow? Ground and Unground doesn’t offer an answer, but it does suggest that even the most lasting icons may someday need to fight for their shape.
Exhibited:
2012, Ground Unground, Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London.
2013, Green Flower Street, curated by Ariel Roger-Paris, Tatiana Kourochkina Galleria D’Art, Istanbul, Turkey-
