Towards the sun

Alvaro Barrington

Alex Burke

Roland Dorcély

Isis Dove-Edwin

14 May - 18 July 2025

Siegfried Contemporary Private Showroom, 16 Bassett Road, London W106JJ

I am showcasing three artists of different age and backgrounds, working in distinct media within the diaspora. They are forming a dialogue with a seminal work by Alvaro Barrington which is part of my personal collection. The subject of the artistic journey and interconnected histories is what unites Roland Dorcély, Alex Burke and Isis Dove-Edwin.

"Towards the sun" stands for a metaphor to discover a better world through the production of cultural goods of any kind.

Works in the exhibition

Roland Dorcély (1930-2017) was born in Haiti and was a pioneer of Caribbean modernity. By the late 50s, he was pursuing a dual career as a painter and poet in Europe and the US and his works were featured in a number of Museums as well as included in some major American collections. Stylistically, he was probably most influenced by the work of Fernand Leger with whom he was very close at the time.

Despite his early success, he eventually stopped working completely due to continuously experiencing discrimination as a Black foreigner, and has therefore remained in the shadows of art history until recently. In 2020 the American gallery Blum and Co organised a group show featuring his work. This was the start of a newfound interest in Dorcély.

However, Paintings by Roland Dorcély remain quite rare. Most of the known works derive from the collection of the Charles August Girard family. A number of paintings were made while he was living in Paris, some of which are currently on show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris: "Paris Noir" showcases a major survey of artists of the French Diaspora for the past 50 years.

Alex Burke was born in Fort-de-France in 1940 and has studied at the Nancy School of Fine Arts. His work is deeply political and explores themes as colonialism, social injustice and cultural exploitation, all the while celebrating the richness and diversity of the Indigenous cultures of the Americas. Using reclaimed fabric imbued with stories, origins and diverse motifs, his dolls reflect the need to pay homage to the oral traditions and the poetry contained in them.

Since the 2000, Burke’s works have been exhibited a number of times in Biennales (Havanna and Taipei Biennale) as well as some major museum shows, notably in France (Palais Tokyo and the Louvre) New York (Brooklyn Museum) and Argentina (Museum of Latin American Art), to name a few. Burke’s work is currently featured in the "Paris Noir" exhibition at the Centre Pompidou.

Alvaro Barrington was born in Venezuela in 1983 to Grenadian and Haitian Parents. Primarily a painter, he also incorporates materials like burlap, textiles, postcards and clothing, exploring how materials themselves can function as visual tools while referencing their personal, political and commercial histories. Art history and the poetry contained in music, especially the hip hop music scene of New York, as well as reggae and soca which he grew up with, remain a large influence on his practice, which engages with the interconnected histories of cultural production.

Isis Dove-Edwin lives in London where she has worked as a doctor for many years. She holds a First Class BA in Ceramic Design at Central St Martins and an MA degree in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art.

She is drawn to the infinite potential of clay to hold memory and express ideas through materiality, process, and form, which can be shared through gifting, exchanging and exhibition. This documentary power of vessels may extend well into the future, as kept or found archaeological objects.

Dove-Edvin explores the diasporic journey of ceramic objects and, motivated by the relative absence of such work within the mainstream canon, engages with the lineage of the 'traditional' domestic coiled terracotta pot from West Africa – vessels communally made by women that have been decontextualised and classified as ethnographic objects by colonial museums to highlight otherness. Challenging the idea of a fixed African tradition of craft, her practise draws on historical narratives and aims to disrupt and activate form and surface as a means of storytelling and embodied practice, which intentionally removes function and alters shape. Thin sheets of terracotta clay serve as a flat canvas where she continues to explore texture, layering and expressive mark making, while also introducing motif and collage. Each piece is unique, commanding its own space - on the edge of pot and figure, craft and art, glaze and paint, monument and decoration.

Jamiu Agboke: Veils of the horizon

A solo exhibition presented by VIN VIN in collaboration with Siegfried Contemporary

Opening:

Monday 7 October 2024

11 am – 11pm

Duration:

8 October, 11am – 10pm

9 – 13 October, 11am – 7pm (and by appointment)

In Jamiu Agboke’s universe of forms, transience is the governing principle. Veils of the Horizon is a series of paintings concerned with shadows over hard objects, traces of past presences, and gleaming residues. As landscape studies, these oils on copper and aluminium, framed in an earthy stained oak, detail the transformations of the natural world at extremities of heat and texture; as abstract experiments on a hostile surface, they become expressive arenas of energetic mark-making that transform the way we see space and place beyond the city walls. Conversant with the rich histories of the English landscape tradition, Agboke renews that tradition for our moment. As in the age of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, who each reckoned in their own distinct surfaces with the ways in which the industrial and agricultural revolutions wrought disfigurements and revelations on the land, Agboke sees our time––or something close to our time, perhaps a near future––as one of radical transformation which refuses to be recollected in tranquillity. Spending time with these vigorous works, we see the traditional format of the landscape painting revolutionised by a force both unfamiliar and yet achingly historical. Above all, Agboke’s fiercely dynamic brushstrokes are tempered by a singular approach to close looking at the world.

- Matthew James Holman, 2024

Jamiu Agboke (b. 1989, Lagos, Nigeria, lives and works in London) graduated at the Royal Drawing School in April 2022. He is represented by VIN VIN Vienna / Naples.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Upcoming

- March 2025, VIN VIN, Vienna

- October 2024, Veils of the horizon, in collaboration with SIEGFRIED CONTEMPORARY, London

Past

- April 2024, Sea View, Los Angeles (CA)

- February 2024, Vertigo, VIN VIN in collaboration with Valerio Polimeno, Paris

- November 2023, Artissima, Turin (IT) with VIN VIN

- May 2023, Dark Waters, VIN VIN, Naples

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

Past

2024

- May - June, Body Symphonies, alongside George Rouy, Alex Foxton, Leo Orta, Claire Fahys, Malù Dalla Piccola, John Fou, Shuo Hao, Ricardo Fumanal, Giovanni Bassan, and Bianca Argimón, curated by Marion Guggenheim and Nicolas Dewavrin, Paris

2023

- July - September, In the shadow, White Cube, alongside Alia Ahmad, Mona Hatoum, Mary Herbert, Tomas Leth (online)

- May - June, A new sensation, Galerie Marguo, Paris

- Project Space, Kane Le Bain

- Jack Barret, New York

2022

- Guts Gallery

- The Split Gallery

- VIN VIN Vienna

NOMAD St. Moritz

Paola Petrobelli

Richard Woods

22 - 25 February 2024

NOMAD St. Moritz, Former Hotel Eden, Via Veglia 10, 7500 St. Moritz

Together with Cora Sheibani, Siegfried Contemporary is delighted to invite you to visit their booth at this year's edition of NOMAD ST. MORITZ

At our joint booth, Siegfried Contemporary will be showcasing Paola Petrobelli's Murano Glass Lamp 24.3 and new Tree Stump Tables by Richard Woods.

NOMAD St. Moritz

22 - 25 February 2024, 11AM - 5PM

Paola Petrobelli is a London-based designer. From the onset of her design career, she has worked exclusively with Murano Glass and its famed Venetian artisans.

She has been commissioned by Wallpaper Magazine, Christian Dior and Peroni and collaborated with Gallery Libby Sellers, Perimeter Art and Design and Nilufar. Her work has been shown at the Triennale Design Museum, Salone Del Mobile Milano, The London Design Festival, and at fairs including Design Miami/Basel and the Pavillion of Art.

Richard Woods graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 1990, where he trained as a sculptor. Woods is well known for his architectural installations and re-surfacing of structures that propose an absurd twist on the cult of home improvement and DIY aesthetics. His works are characterised by cartoon-like decorative surfaces, bold patterns and vibrant colours.

His works are held in major collections including the Saatchi Collection, London; Arts Council England, London; Victoria and Albert Museum; London; British Museum, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Paris Calling

Amélie Bigard

Jean Claracq

Clément Courgeon

Matthias Garcia

Nicolas Gaume

Cecilia Granara

Desiree Moheb Zandi

Madeleine Roger-Lacan

9 December 2022 - 28 February 2023

Siegfried Contemporary Private showroom, 16 Bassett Road, London W106JJ

Siegfried Contemporary and Sapling are pleased to present Paris Calling, a group exhibition celebrating the artistic energy coming from the city in the present moment. Unfolding across the two gallery spaces, the exhibition's first part opened on Friday 9th December at Siegfried Contemporary and will last till the end of January.

Sapling opened its doors for the second part on Tuesday 10th January 2023.

The two galleries have come together to curate a compelling selection of the talent emerging from Paris. The city continues to carry its history with pride. Its streets and cultural institutions are filled with reminders of its literary and artistic golden ages of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

A number of the artists in this show look to the future while being imbued in this sense of long cultural history, hailing from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, one of the most significant art schools in France. They are joined by international artists having recently chosen to make Paris their home, attracted by the optimism that currently fuels the artistic scene in the city.

As Allen Ginsberg once said, “You can’t escape the past in Paris, and yet what’s so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn’t seem to burden.”

List of works

Foreign Affair

Egle Jauncems

Marcel Miracle

Anne Roger-Lacan

13 February - 15 March 2022, Saanen, Switzerland

Chalet Mazeau (annex to Chalet Farb, Farbstrasse 20, 3792 Saanen) and Chalet Mittelgässli Dorfstrasse 79, 3792 Saanen

Siegfried Contemporary is pleased to announce “Foreign Affair” a three person exhibition presenting the works of artists Egle Jauncems, Anne Roger Lacan and Marcel Miracle.

The link that brings together the three artists in “Foreign Affair” is their use of the found object, partially used in the style of “objet trouvé” in the vein of Marcel Duchamp or partially appropriated and recomposed following a rich art historical tradition which dates in the western canon from the early 1900s with the Cubist’s use of scavenged materials.

The three artists are brought together here with the title Foreign Affair (inspired by the seminal Mike Oldfield composition) to underline their very distinct backgrounds and histories that intersect here with their common exploration of the theme of time, space, memory and history.

Artist Marcel Miracle (born in 1957 in Moramanga, Madagascar, lives in Switzerland and Tunisia) taps into the tradition of the use of found materials with his objects trouvés and juxtapositions.. For more than thirty years, the artist has been creating small formats, a cosmogony from the heterogeneous objects he finds (broken shells, cuttlefish bones, twigs, rusty capsules, colored rubber, papers and other objects from his daily life or his Saharan travels), but also from the writing of short stories, poems, annotations, and titles to which he pays particular attention. He draws his references from African shamanism, from the works of Arthur Cravan, Perec, Borgès or Malcolm de Chazal. Marcel Miracle defines his work as an organization of chaos into cosmos, an alchemy of word and sign.

Egle Jauncems’ (born, 1984, Vilnius, Lithuania, lives in London) visual analysis revolves around found imagery, textual fractions and overheard conversations. Working across painting, sculpture, and assemblage Jauncems works are surrogates for her research interests and roving eye.Her works in “Foreign Affair” are inspired by the Lithuanian cobbler and nighttime pattern designer Paulinas Kaulinas (1933-2017), whose book of over two hundred never-realised weaving patterns Loving thy mother through the patterns of cloth marked the starting point of her process. For this body of work Egle has revisited old canvases which have been reappropriated and transformed into the patterns and codes inspired by the drawings of Paulinas Kaluina.

Anne Roger Lacan’s (Born and living in France) practice has strong connections with Art Brut, the art movement initiated by Jean Dubuffet. She creates sculptures which have strong emotional ties to memory. Focused on questions relative to space and time, Roger Lacan’s work is based and built on investigations and silences. Her work expounds a discourse on time tied to reflection, her compositions form a precious balancing act between matter and memory. A composition such as Wedding Hands is an example of the artist’s exploration on the passing of time and, as in all her works, there is a subtle poetic investigation of the fleeting forgotten moments.

Available Works

ABSTRACTION RELOAD

Alex Hubbard

Sergej Jensen

Gedi Sibony

9 October - 19 November 2021

Siegfried Contemporary Private showroom, 16 Bassett Road, London W106JJ

ABSTRACTION RELOAD

Alex Hubbard, Sergei Jensen, Gedi Sibony

Siegfried Contemporary is delighted to host Berlin's gallerie Neu in its London space for its first joint curatorial collaboration : Abstraction Reload.

Through this initiative we aim to encourage the evaluation of existing models, pooling resources and acting collaboratively to offer the opportunity of adding new voices to the London fall art program.

List of works

Alex Hubbard:

Alex Hubbard ((b.1975 Tolego, Oregon) is a Los Angeles based artist whose work encompasses video art and painting, exploring the boundaries of each via a cross-examination that invigorates both media in new and inventive ways. Hubbard’s paintings often suggest a mechanical means of production. Fields of colour in fibreglass and resin are interrupted with richly pooled, dripped and poured paint. Working with fast drying materials, such as epoxy and latex, the artist is forced to act quickly, embracing chance happenings and revelling in the autonomy of the chosen media and through this deconstruction every traditional opposition to the formal language of painting is opened up.

Selected public collections:

Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY ; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Collection Jumex, MCDX; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Art Institute of Chicago; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami

Sergej Jensen:

Sergej Jensen’s work draws on a wide range of materials and formal references. Primarily known for his textile works, his lyrical compositions incorporate a variety of fabrics, from burlap and linen to silk and wool. Working within the idiom of minimalist painting, Jensen takes its material support – the canvas – and sews, bleaches, stretches or stains the cloth to create works that waver between abstraction and representation. The principle of the readymade and recycling also suffuse his practice; off-cuts from previous works often re-appear as motifs for new paintings; hand-knitted lengths are sewn or pulled over stretchers; sections of fabric are left outside to let the weather alter its surface. His practice draws attention to seemingly incidental details such as flecks of wool or frayed edges, and his muted palette and gestural mark-making, whether applied in paint or stained with bleach, point as much to negative space as to delineated forms.

Selected public collections:

Los Angeles County Museum of Art,L; Museum of Contemporary Art, LA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SF; Moderna Museet, Stockholm;Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; National Gallery, Copenhagen.

Gedi Sibony

Gedi Sibony’s work falls within the legacies of painting, assemblage, and sculpture. His wall pieces are never strictly two-dimensional, frequently leaning against walls or hanging precariously. Sibony’s practice is inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines and Richard Tuttle’s sculptures; he accumulates everyday, cheap, and discarded objects, and materials that include packing materials, plastic sheeting, carpeting, wood, and cardboard boxes. His works are minimal and meticulous arrangements with a sensitivity for material texture and geometry.

Selected public collections:

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art LA; MOMA, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SF; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whytney Museum, NY; Israel Museum , Jerusalem.