Overview
Taking as its starting point the concept that perpetual motion machines create energy indefinitely, this exhibition brings together works that explore the tension between movement and stillness in painting. Painting, though traditionally a still medium, has long sought to capture movement, energy and the fluidity of thought and emotion. Within these new and historical works, there is an extraction and projection of energy that has been distilled to communicate the intricate lives of women. Unique approaches to painterly techniques fuse, playing with pace and impressions of movement.
Pilar Corrias presents Perpetual Motion Machines, a group exhibition featuring work by Pacita Abad, Loie Hollowell, Christina Quarles, Tschabalala Self and Mickalene Thomas.
Taking as its starting point the concept that perpetual motion machines create energy indefinitely, this exhibition brings together works that explore the tension between movement and stillness in painting. Painting, though traditionally a still medium, has long sought to capture movement, energy and the fluidity of thought and emotion. Within these new and historical works, there is an extraction and projection of energy that has been distilled to communicate the intricate lives of women. Unique approaches to painterly techniques fuse, playing with pace and impressions of movement.
Pacita Abad was a Filipino American visual artist whose pioneering work is characterised by vibrant colours and an accumulation of processes and materials. She is best known for her trapunto paintings, a form of quilted painting the artist originated by stitching and stuffing her painted canvases as opposed to stretching them over a wood frame. Abad’s richly detailed abstractions are inspired by Korean ink brush painting and Indonesian Batik (a textile that uses wax and dyes to create dots widely arranged in stunning patterns and designs). Exploring a range of materials and textures, Abad’s abstraction paintings play with line and colour to imbue energy through carefully constructed static patterning. Notes from musical genres such as Jazz and the Blues, both essential to Abad’s life and studio environment, echo across the artist’s abstracted canvases, shaping the physicality of her paintings.
Loie Hollowell’s practice explores the intersections of abstraction, figuration and optical tensions drawn from the bodily landscape. Working with geometric symbolic shapes such as the mandorla, ogee and lingam, Hollowell anchors her compositions in a central, singular axis, melding sculpted, protruding forms that confound expectations of painting. References from the California Light and Space Movement and Neo-Tantric painters are woven into Hollowell’s visual lexicon. Within her new suite of works, the concentric shapes and reverberations of colour create a visual play that hints at different anatomical imaginaries. Primary colours create formal spaces that hold and direct energy points within Hollowell’s compositions. This sense of depth and gradual pulsation considers the dramatic evolutions of the female body in particular and the idiosyncracies of our interior worlds.
Through her paintings, Christina Quarles depicts entangled, ambiguous figures that defy rigid definitions, echoing the instability of identity and perception. Through expressive, gestural mark-making and a rejection of fixed perspective, Quarles creates compositions that appear to be in constant motion. Her work extends beyond the physicality of all-over painting to explore themes of personal and cultural hybridity, blurring the boundaries between body, space and abstraction. On Yull Always Be a Part a Me, 2025, Quarles writes: ‘Forms, both in the figuration and the tree, are repeated and distorted, a shadow of what was, a projection of what is yet to be (or perhaps can never be). There’s no way for me to hide my emotional state while making the work; there are moments of sadness with this painting, but also moments of vibrancy and a sense of liberation.’
Tschabalala Self’s figures are kaleidoscopic and layered. Through the use of various materials and textiles, including cut canvas itself, her paintings are deconstructed and rearranged. Her works transform traditional spatial organisation. There is an cyclical energy evident in each work that transcends linear understanding. The complexity of her oeuvre reflects the dynamic quality of her figures, predominately women. The formal and conceptual aspects of Self’s work seek to expand her critical inquiry into selfhood and human flourishing. Her work extends beyond the physicality of painting and explores themes of personal and cultural hybridity, the boundaries between body and mind, figuration and abstraction.
Mickalene Thomas brings a vibrant and layered approach to all-over composition, using collage, photography and sculptural surfaces to infuse her paintings with a palpable sense of motion. In her Tete de Femme series (translated as ‘head of a woman’), Thomas merges 20th-century Cubism and contemporary pop references, playing with the formal qualities of portraiture whilst simultaneously reclaiming and reimagining representations of Black femininity and beauty. Thomas’s geometric collaged cut-outs shimmer with energy as materials reflect layers of movement across the picture plane. Rather than focusing on a single subject or element, her paintings invite viewers to engage with every part of the surface, absorbing a complex interplay of patterns, textures and forms.
