Platform Shows

Adam Easton (b.1989) is an American figurative artist who creates delicate still lives that are presented in such a way as to be perceived as portraits drawn from autobiographical narratives and intimate everyday moments. Offering a contemporary rendering of Old Masters' compositions, the works for the Platform exhibition exemplify the artist’s refined brushwork and painterly approach. Drenched in vinaceous tones the paintings assume an elegant yet unnerving quality, further intensified by the depiction of glass masks, suggestive of darker themes within the works.
Chosen Charity: DESK (Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen)

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Madeline Peckenpaugh (b.1991) is an American born artist whose practice focuses on striking metaphorical landscapes that engulf the viewer in unique synaesthetic experiences. Drawing inspiration from nature, Peckenpaugh uses the exterior world to delve into the subconscious, exploring the role that the environment plays on the self.

Chosen Charity: Women’s Medical Fund (WMF)

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Betty Leung is a London based visual artist. Her multidisciplinary practice extends to sculpture, installation, photography and video, allowing her to research the relationship between migration, labour and technology through various mediums. For her first Platform presentation Leung created a new body of work that is a continuation of her Interpreting Relations Series. The name of the series refers to a common experience of migrant children whose parents often depend on their translation and interpretation skills in a range of settings. This subject is of particular interest to the artist as Leung herself has a multilayered migration story - being of Chinese descent and growing up in Australia, subsequently moving to London to pursue her career as an artist. 

Chosen Charity: The Algorithmic Justice League

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Raymond Lemstra (b.1978, Groningen, The Netherlands) explores the mediums of painting and drawing with a childlike sense of wonder, balancing figuration and abstraction in perfect harmony. His imaginative fantasy characters evoke surrealistic compositions with the “illustrative nature of primitive drawings and sculptures” as he seeks to explore memories and feelings from childhood.

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Katja Farin is an LA based artist whose work is characterised by a vibrant colour palette and is thematically focused on the human figure. Farin's artistic influences range from contemporary artists such as Noah Davis and Issy Wood, to more classical influences such as Max Beckmann, Edward Munch, R.B. Kitaj, and Vuillard. For their first Platform presentation, Farin has produced a series of original screen prints of intimate and lived human experiences.

Chosen Charity: Tranzmission Prison Project (TPP)

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For his Platform series Mexican-born, multidisciplinary artist Amadeo Morelos chose to depict an elaborate world that captures the viewer through close-cropped perspectives that display whimsical interactions between the protagonists. In a continuation of the thematics explored in his solo exhibition at Unit London, titled Providence (2021), this series similarly features subjects in conflict with their natural surroundings. Characteristic of Morelos' practice is iconography that originates from Greek mythology, drawing inspiration from tales of Hercules, Apollo and Dionysus. This series reflects the narrative of ‘The Choice of Hercules’, suggesting parallels between a hero and everyman. 

Chosen Charity: Forests for Monarchs

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Mariah Ferrari (b.1996, USA) is a contemporary visual artist whose practice explores themes surrounding fabricated sentience, the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Ferrari depics the sensation of touch through disembodied hands, allowing the viewer to focus on this singular sense. 

Hyperreal colour and lighting bring the figures to life, enhancing the plausibility of the environment whilst bringing its utter absurdness to the viewer's attention. Water saturates both the figure and the ground, highlighting the still surface of water before submergence, providing opportune moments for painting. The figure interacts through playful touch and slippery movements, contained in a dreamlike state. This challenges our perception of sentience both in actuality and simulation, calling into question the sensory event of being alive. Mariah lives and works in Milwaukee, USA.

Chosen Charity: Milwaukee Women's Center (Community Advocates)

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Amy Beager (b. 1988) lives and works from her studio in Chelmsford, UK. Amy’s painterly language has re-imagined figurative painting with her bold colour juxtapositions; figures rendered in a simultaneously classical yet modern style; and compositions which are exquisitely romantic and poetic. Parallel to the joyous vivid colour palette and swathes of rich paint and brushwork, often the figures appear restless, fervent, and in a complex tension of ecstasy and anguish. Reminiscent of the dramatic poses of the divine saints from the Renaissance period, these figures hover between the classical and the contemporary. Amy's paintings both celebrate and explore the emotional intensity and intimacy of love. Predominantly featuring the female figure, Beager casts these female protagonists as modern-day deities, transcending their stature and presence; suspended, dream-like, between the imagined and reality.

Chosen Charity: Open Cages, UK

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Emma Odumade (b.2000) is a multi-faceted Nigerian artist whose work centers around hyper realistic drawings which interact with notions of identity and explore the social constructs of beauty and power. Born and raised in Lagos, his art journey started at a very young age - drawing comics and cartoons and pasting collages on paper. In his latest body of work for Platform, Odumade explores themes of birth, life, identity, cultural practices and a philosophy of 'togetherness' through mixed media.

Chosen Charity: Treasure of Love Missionaries of Charity

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Shir Pakman’s artwork combines 3D digital mediums with traditional genres and styles. Pakman draws on Classical figurative art (renaissance, Dutch, German and British) to create works that feel situated in the contemporary while drawing on the past. Bridging the expansive gap between traditional art genres and contemporary digital practices, Pakman’s artworks are idiosyncratic renderings of peaceful and sensitive figures caught between worlds. 

Institut and Platform are delighted to collaborate to bring together a special set of five of Pakman’s works, offered exclusively for sale across our two platforms. 

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Austrian artist Stefan Zsaitsits currently lives and works near Vienna. In his latest body of work for Platform, Zsaitsits continues to explore the most important medium in his process: drawing. The medium of drawing allows Zsaitsits to follow traces of the unconscious, impressions of daily life or almost forgotten memories, noting that "drawing is the medium that comes closest to human thought". The solitary figures within his work occupy surreal and dreamlike worlds, reflecting the interior workings of the mind. Rationality and irrationality, order and chaos, real and surreal exist in tandem in the artist's mind and on the page. Ultimately, the works are depictions of the absurdity and irrationality of life. 

Chosen Charity: Médecins Sans Frontières, UK

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Larissa De Jesús Negrón is a multidisciplinary artist who yearns for introspection and finds self evaluation through her intimate and often otherworldly spaces and portraits. Her stylistically varied and neo-surreal imagery is linked to the artist’s curiosity of the subconscious and neuroticism. Larissa has a profound interest in healing and addressing her childhood and adult trauma through her work. For all of us, the expression of emotion is essential to overcoming trauma. These mundane moments of despair, fear and excitement are brought to the eyes of the viewer as a cathartic way to connect.

Chosen Charity: Safe Passage Project

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Alfie Rouy takes on forms from the natural world in order to materialise the flow of versatile, fluid-like energies that exist within our shared field of existence. His free-flowing forms express elements of polarity and unity through figurative imagery - a vision of dreamlike divinity and a surreal reality accompanied by warm, hazy colours, extending an over-exaggerated notion of the works’ original intent of transposing peace, love, wisdom, and unity upon the viewer. In this series of works for Platform, Rouy has created a narrative throughout his works that aim to document just a few seconds of time. Within these moments each character, unbeknownst to each other, form and align into some sort of synchronisation with one another.

Chosen Charity:  Young Minds, UK

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Stacey Gillian Abe's latest body of work explores ideas of being and becoming, living in one’s truest self through self-discovery and an understanding of one's own identity. Some of the most vital issues facing the Black population includes a sense of belonging, to be seen and heard and to be understood. Of Kings, Queens and Prostitutes explores these issues to highlight a state of being and becoming; to live in one’s truest form as a journey towards self-discovery.

Chosen Charity: Refugee Council, London

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This exhibition is an exploration of how Black contemporary photographers are exploring Blackness, and its many facets through photography. It is a bold coming together of global talent that reclaims the agency of the Black figure. There was a time when photography documented our oppression; black bodies captured through the shutter clicks of white hands. With Imaging Blackness, through the work of these photographers, I look to present personal aspects of Blackness to prove that we are not a monolith. I hope to offer space for connection and new energies, to dance and dream. - Aindrea Emelife, Curator

Chosen Charity: Black Minds Matter