Alexis Soul-Gray: Pink Skipping Rope
— The Arts Club London 22 January — 12 May 2024

The solo exhibition by British artist Alexis Soul-Gray (b.1980) features a combination of new works and beautiful examples from the artist’s earlier oeuvre, showcasing the diversity and intricacies of her fascinating practice. Soul-Gray’s extraordinary works combine painting, drawing, collage, and alchemy to explore key themes around family life: love, grief, generational trauma, inherited dysfunction and their deep-seated influences on our feelings, perceptions, and actions as adults.

Soul-Gray’s multidisciplinary practice transforms found images – often cliched and contrived tableaus of ideal femininity – by defacing and reordering them, sometimes through rubbing and scraping away sections of the image, sometimes by using caustic chemicals like bleach. The resulting images are both lustrous in colour and simultaneously washed out, with an eerie beauty which is as deeply moving as it is enchanting.

The exhibition displays a selection of works which build upon this concept of a falsified image and evoke the complexities of both authentic and constructed identities. The paintings encourage the viewer to reflect upon the high standards against which women are held, and the multi-faceted nature of human identity. Soul-Gray describes her work as “a means of puppetry, helping me to articulate versions of a particular experience or narrative that needs to be told”; the paintings on display invite the viewer to trace these different narratives for themselves and examine their own experiences. 

The exhibition is curated by Amelie von Wedel and Pernilla Holmes of Wedel Art, with special thanks to the artist for making this show possible.