Thinking in Action takes as its point of departure the notion of image-making as a means of externalising, or, indeed, materialising thought. Cartographers of internal and external landscapes, the artists featured speak to what remains essentially human: the ability to close our eyes and evoke both physical and psychic worlds.
This selection of artworks, which span a range of artistic materials and formal methods, acknowledges the undetermined, precarious quality of the physical objects and emotional states we experience, tracing both impulsions and blind spots of thought.
Utilising painting and drawing as tools for translating thought into action, the group of artists manifest their internal visions and sensations, crystallising them into tangible, autonomous forms. Just as the processes of cognition momentarily assume form and go on to spark new lines of thought, the works interact to create a conversation that renews itself over and over.
Helen Johnson's work draws upon both personal, immediate experience and broader observations, socio-cultural and historical. Notably this is the artist’s first body of work that does not contain external referents, but draws on a flow of imagery produced in her mind during her training as an art therapist in a hospital’s psychiatric unit.
The figures in these paintings are not speculative beings, but ways of figuring our being in the world – our social relations that at times are simultaneously nurturing and extractive, inquisitive and vulnerable. The actual and the real – what we experience of the world on a conscious level, and the unbearable force that lies beneath the surface.
Overview
Through his quest for meaning, transparency and openness, Manuel Mathieu undertakes a process of discovering his multidisciplinary work, as opposed to creating it. His practice investigates themes of historical violence, erasure and cultural approaches to physicality, nature and spiritual legacy. Mathieu’s interests are partially informed by his upbringing in Haiti, and his experience emigrating to Montreal at the age of 19. Freely operating in between and borrowing from numerous historical influences and traditions, Mathieu aims to find meaning through a spiritual or asemic mode of apparition.
‘The objects [of my practice] are the residues of my thoughts… it forces you to see the work not just for what it is but as the journey of a spiritual being, manifesting its existence to a certain point.’
—Manuel Mathieu, 2023
Peppi Bottrop grew up in the now largely disused industrial districts of the Ruhrgebiet, Europe’s largest and once most prosperous coal-mining region. ‘Once described as ‘the manic cartography of an urban flaneur’, Bottrop’s compositions resemble the frayed infrastructure and overlapping highway interchanges of the Ruhr area, while also also brimming with alternative routes, some of which border on the realm of science fiction. Over the past three years, the artist’s characteristic choppy dashes have become increasingly organic, almost arabesque. As if fuelled by remnants of the fossil energy inherent in his brittle trademark medium, Bottrop’s charcoal marks proliferate and overgrow other elements in the composition.’ (Anna Sinofzik)
Koo Jeong A’s series of large watercolour paintings depict various large basalt rock formations originating from the demilitarised zone in Cheorwon-gun/Gangwon-do, between North and South Korea. According to the Ramsar Convention, no ecological material can leave the protected conservation wetland situated between the two Koreas. For Koo this creates a type of void. With no beginning or end, it is the void, or the space in between the rocks, that contains their power.
Sophie von Hellermann's soft-hued paintings are imbued with the workings of her subconscious. She applies pure pigment on unprimed canvas very quickly and with a lightness of touch to portray scenes as they appear to her. Von Hellermann's paintings swiftly tangle a mixture of her thoughts on current affairs, literature and mythology with what she observes, situating her pictures in a space between imagination and reality. Working in succession, her broad-brushed washes follow a continuity of thought where one painting often leads to the next.