online catalogue
4 September - 7 November 2021
No Man’s Art Gallery is honored to present TWISTER, Mia Chaplin’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The works are all created in Amsterdam where she has been working as NMAG Artist in Residence over the past summer month.
TWISTER enters a body of work that oscillates between the abstract and figurative in which Chaplin explores the crooked and imperfect nature of intimate relationships. In rich impasto oil paintings and sculptures, with the immediacy of prominent brush strokes and expressive color palettes, she searches for the vivid tension between the soft and the violent, the familiar and the estranged. When it comes to passionate love, danger always lurks.
Endless kissing scenes of young love, the silent devastation after a perfect storm, an abstracted scene of two fighting dogs frozen in a deadly battle painted in fleshy pinks, reds in blues. Saliva exchanges in fights and embraces. We see bodies intertwined, wrapped, curled inwards in scenes that hint at the sensual and emotional richness of the classical baroque paintings of Rubens. Are we witnessing an act of intimacy or one of fending off?
It is the ambiguity between the works that Chaplin carefully highlights; by juxtaposing this diverse selection Chaplin makes us second guess what we see: “It's both beauty and destruction; the one who is there to love and protect also is the one that violently hurts and betrays. This body of work in general is an attempt to anxiously grapple for some kind of control. It reflects the desire to trust, to be safe and vulnerable alongside the fear of being betrayed, deceived and misled.” (Chaplin)
Photos: Sonia Mangiapane
Mia Chaplin in her studio by Jonathan Kope
Mia Chaplin (b.1990 South Africa) is a South African artist based in Cape Town. Her work is situated between painting and sculpture, with her impasto oil paintings and painted papier-mâché/plaster of Paris sculptures forming the basis of her practice. Chaplin uses materiality, colour, texture and visual motifs symbolically to address themes of identity, femininity and the body.