25 May–8 July 2023
Lungley Gallery
53 Great Portland Street
London, W1W 7LG
Second floor

Opening 25 May, 1–8pm (artist will be present 5–8pm)

Opening tomorrow at the Lungley Gallery is KATABASIS: journey to the underworld, a solo exhibition by Maya Balcioglu.

Statement for Lungley Gallery by Maya Balcioglu:

Extracts from notebooks between 2022-23: In these works I’ve tried to metabolise an environment through the agencies of the distinct materialities of fabric, paper, skin. By their historical references they are both present in our time but also suggest an embodiment of a distancing mechanism, a long view, because woven into it are complex set of anachronic conditions beyond the immediate. Fabric, paper and skin is sculpting with time held in tension. Gardeners might understand a similar interweaving through plants, soil, weather, seasons etc. This mood and matter of tensed time captures a broad present that is not fixed to a single track.

Working with these materialities I’ve come to realise that physical qualities of the material act as a trigger. It is a disturbance because it is already endowed with qualities of the image; there is an image before an image. It has inert content, it is a thing in front of a thought. In the studio the matter goes through conversions, both intuitive and conscious. This is a process of reduction to find a clearing between what is not knowable and a shape of a recognisable language which we can share.

Works exist in their own opacity. They are neither abstract nor figurative. Ambiguity comes from the liminal space of being at the borders of sleep and awakening. It is filmy, murky, thick, hazy, obfuscated, veiled; an endlessness without conclusion. A story with no exit. Neither the matter of an image, nor the intentional form makes an image. The cryptic obscurity is between articulating a thought and its relationship to image. A threshold of neither entrance nor departure.

For further information and texts relating to the exhibition, visit the Lungley Gallery website.

Maya Balcioglu is a contributor to The Stuart Brisley Interviews: Performance and its Afterlives, published by Book Works in 2020.