Altered

About

Roman Road is pleased to present Altered, a group exhibition featuring works by Alix Marie, Daisuke Yokota, Gita Lenz and Marie Orensanz. Bringing together varied sculptural and photographic pieces, the show looks at how these international artists have probed the realms of the abstract and the surreal through explorations of human experiences, ontology and the everyday.

The exhibition begins with a sculpture by Alix Marie on the floor by the gallery entryway. Her Femme Fontaine / Feet (2016) is a concrete cast of two feet displayed together in a criss-crossed form. The tops of the feet appear to have been roughly severed, mimicking the display of broken statues from antiquity. Marie’s practice is rooted in her investigations of bodies and their representation; her works often show the human body in a disjointed form, drawing on a tradition of fragmentation that comes from classical sculpture and at once reinterpreting the sculptural object.

Featured on the adjacent wall is a collection of photographs from Daisuke Yokota’s Taratine (2015). An ode to his girlfriend, these intimate, close-up images of the most important women in his life are often blurry with visible grain or printed with smut strewn across the surface, materialising an unexpected depth and tactility. The exhibition also includes a work from Yokota’s Matter/Burn Out (2016) – a series of highly abstract photographs that capture his process of setting fire to installation prints in an abandoned construction site – as well as an unique, experimental photograph made by the artist’s hand.

A single, framed black and white photograph by Gita Lenz occupies the opposite wall and shows the late photographer’s interest in forms and shapes, both natural and manmade. During her active years as an artist, primarily the 1940s and 1950s, Lenz moved from street photography into more abstract, surreal compositions, creating contemplative images inspired by day-to-day encounters.

Altered also presents a selection of drawings by Marie Orensanz on broken remnants of marble. Her pieces consist of minimalistic and diagrammatic compositions with neatly written and scattered words, and often blocks of colour. Her indecipherable drawings, spreading from one work to the next, point to a connective yet ambiguous transformation, and investigate conceptual ideas of abstraction.