Huxley-Parlour Gallery is pleased to present a solo presentation of 16 new works on paper by Berlin based artist, Iris Schomaker, opening in June of 2021. The exhibition will be Schomaker’s first UK solo show. 

Taken from a line in a Charlotte Brontë poem, Evening Solace, the title of the exhibition ‘in secret kept/ in silence sealed’ reflects on interiority, solitude, and reworks the romantic understanding of ‘emotion, recollected in tranquility’. Rendered in flat, monochromatic planes, Schomaker’s characters are often pictured solitary, sometimes with an accompanying animal, and often in large scale. 

Schomaker’s figures - inscrutable and monolithic - are psychologically charged, drawing from Jungian archetypes to create atmospheric portraits that invite viewers to engage with introspective, ‘androgyn’ figures. Influenced by Japanese Woodblock prints and ink drawings, Schomaker’s works are built up with both charcoal and watercolour and finished with oil paint to create deep, gothic tableaus that Schomaker describes as like ‘film stills’. 

Brontë’s poetry takes imaginative departure from a post-cartesian conception of self. Here, the Romantic ‘recluse’ has an impenetrable exterior, harbouring secret feelings, desires, hopes and fears. Schomaker’s exhibition meaningfully reworks this conception by presenting her figures as radically vacant. While the surfaces of Schomaker’s work - angular, coarse, geometric - are symbolically charged, the characters of her paintings refuse to confer meaning. This is particularly evident in Schomaker’s faces, which remain obscured in each of the works. In turn, this collection of works - developed over a number of months - allow us to materially consider our contemporary sense of ‘self’.