On Longing (Or, Modern Objects Volume II)

Huxley-Parlour are pleased to announce On Longing, a group exhibition of 10 international artists. The exhibition seeks to explore modern objecthood and its representation in paint, encoding themes of genesis, destination, and also termination.

Includes: Alexandra Barth, Thomas Bils, Hamish Chapman, Grace Lee, Tristan Piggott, Paul Rouphail, Astrid Styma, Lee Sujin, Sara Suppan, Caroline Zumerly

The contemporary object has an anxiety of permanence, particularly in our current context: booming global, material economies, and a looming sense of environmental disaster. Here, the contemporary object has a corollary lexicon: production, purpose, utility and waste. This exhibition highlights image making that manifests this anxiety through a focus on materiality – tenderly described, lustrous surfaces, emphatic lighting, pointed, haloed presences.

The exhibition also draws attention to the tacit tension between this serious rendering and a playful attitude towards subject. It is a tension that speaks to both the ambivalence and the fetishisation attached to objects in the current moment. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from poet and critic Susan Stewart’s 1993 publication On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection in which Stewart investigates nostalgia, desire and scale through the lens of everyday objects.