Amar Gallery is proud to present Eve, an upcoming exhibition of contemporary art that celebrates the female

form and the fateful origins of womanhood. Incorporating mythical themes from the Genesis story - with

particular focus on The Fall, heavenly wrath, nature and rebellion - Eve brings together a collection of drawings, installations and photographs inspired by nature’s first heroine, as well as showcasing female empowerment within the context of modern society. The exhibition will be on display from January 23rd 2018, at 48 Penton Street, London.

​

Each artist included within Eve carefully reimagines the Creation story through the prism of their own

unique craft. Renée Cox, known for her provocative photography that positions historic subjects in

tension with her African-American heritage, assumes the title role of Eve in her Adam & Eve series,

using her naked body as a symbol of strength in a culture constantly in conflict with gender and race.

Cox delves further into this socio-political dialogue with Girl in Da Bush, placing Eve within a jungle

that exudes not only a preternatural state of innocence, but also an undertone of impending struggle.

This theme is mirrored in the equally-controversial contributions of the Guerrilla Girls, a collective of

feminist activists famed for their unashamedly outrageous visuals that seek to address equality for

women in politics, commerce and culture. Interpreting Eve as a rebel with a cause, works such as Do

Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met. Museum? and Women In America Earn Only 2/3 Of

What Men Do challenge the viewer to assess whether the fight against institutional male favouritism

has yet been won.

​

Sonja Braas, whose otherworldly photographs are investigations of tempestuous landscapes and the

romantic sublime, channels Eve as an agent of powerful change - both in resistance and embrace to

the forces of nature that followed The Fall. Charged with a thunderous sense of biblical grandeur, the

gaze of the disembodied camera in Eclipse, Lava Flow and Wave capture the wondrous violence of

Eve’s banishment, cast off into a world of flood, smoke and flame. This fearless interplay between

nature and technology also manifests in the connective art of Jenna Burchell, whose tortoise skeleton

from her Cradle of Humankind collection is reactive to the human touch - in this piece, both a

performative songsmith and a timely relic of the natural world, Burchell is the creator of harmony and

music within our own personal Eden.

​

Indian artist Mekhala Bahl views the theme of Eve through the prism of abstract colour and design.

Known as an interdisciplinary artist whose creations defy label or fixed reason, Bahl weaves together

tapestries of light, dream and meditative self-inquiry. These evocations of luminosity and intangible

memory take us back to the dawn of womankind - before the world was seen through the restrictive

lens of structure and form. This break from the predictable is echoed in the work of Antony Gormley,

the only male artist on display in Eve. Known for his defining imagery in the public realm, Gormley

fittingly contributes The Fall of Man, a powerful drawing that repositions Adam as the harbinger of

original sin and mankind’s ill-fated fall from grace. It is this level of forensic investigation into the human

condition that defines all the pieces in Eve - experienced through the female body, mind and soul.

​

Sonja Braas

The visual aesthetic of Sonja Braas (born 1968, Siegen) is one of dazzling paradox. Viewers see

clearly recognisable natural phenomena and forces, such as icy alpine regions, thundering

avalanches, tempestuous surf, or urban centres and cities flooded or in flames. Yet nature’s essence

seems alienated. The images look artificial, for they are only partially based on actual nature and

landscape photographs. Many of the images are of models built by the artist, lending them a

characteristically uncanny atmosphere. While Romantic painting assigns the viewer a fixed viewpoint,

generally represented by a figure in the picture, from which he or she can perceive the sublimity

behind the terror of nature from a safe distance, Braas rejects any foothold whatsoever. Only the

disembodied camera seems immersed in the events taking place in the photographs.

​

Renee Cox

One of the most controversial African-American artists working today, Renée Cox has used her own

body, both nude and clothed, to celebrate black womanhood and criticise a society she often views

as racist and sexist. Cox continues to push the envelope with her work by using new technologies

that the digital medium of photography has to offer. By working from her archives and shooting new

subjects, Cox seeks to push the limits of her older work and create new consciousnesses of the body.

Cox's new work aims to "unleash the potential of the ordinary and bring it into a new realm of

possibilities". "It's about time that we re-imagine our own constitution," states Cox.

 

Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and

racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing

gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community. The group employs culture

jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, and public appearances to expose discrimination

and corruption. To remain anonymous, members don gorilla masks and use pseudonyms that refer to

deceased female artists. According to the Guerrilla Girls, identities are concealed because issues

matter more than individual identities, "Mainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our

personalities or our own work."

​

Mekhala Bahl trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, after which she returned to India in

2003 to pursue her individual art practice. Mekhala has never restricted herself to single techniques or

media. She has worked with materials as diverse as glass, wood, silk, paper, plastic and quilting. Her

technical oeuvre extends from block -printing, etching and lithography, to drawing, painting or simply

marks scratched on to the matrix. Mekhala creates endless possibilities; blurring and divesting

watertight categories of their legitimacy in her art making. The scale of her work too, ranges from

small intimate images to vast canvases, neither, adhering to a practiced formulae.

​

Jenna Burchell is an anti-disciplinary South African artist. Her practice weaves together various

forms of technology, science, anthropology, sound, and art. Burchell builds responsive sculptural

objects and large-scale interactive environments for exhibition visitors to play with. People call them

‘memory harps’ or ‘empathy machines’. She creates them to connect people, communities, and

places around the world to each other. Burchell’s work explores the integration of emotive intelligence

and technology as she believes that the combination of these elements has the potential to inspire the

future of human experience. Her work explores themes of memory, land, home and belonging.

​

Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that

investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened

up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of

others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to

nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in

which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited

throughout the UK and internationally.