Artists

Press release

Near to the Wild Heart is an intergenerational group show featuring work by Anderson Borba, Hilda Kortei, Bill Lynch, Kentaro Okumura, Carole Vanderlinden and Sam Windett. Their practices are connected by an intuitive and instinctive undercurrent, where the work sits ambivalently between representation, figuration and abstraction. Surface and texture feature prominently: collage emerges as a recurring process; thick applications of paint spread across seemingly torn patchwork canvases; wooden panels are drilled through to reveal the wall behind; others are composed of modular boards, while organic sculptures are singed and papered over. The title of the show, borrowed from Clarice Lispector's 1943 novel, quietly permeates the works, suggesting that each artist is guided as much by intuition as by intention. Yet it is through the tactile language of materials, their weight and texture, that these impulses take shape, grounding the exhibition in a sensorial encounter between feeling and form. Through his practice, Brazilian artist Anderson Borba seeks textural ambiguity, twisting and expanding the material and conceptual possibilities of wood. Drawing on Afro-Brazilian spiritual traditions, Brazilian modernism, and sculptural lineages spanning from ancestral ritual objects to modernist abstraction. He transforms materials through processes of burning, carving, painting, and assemblage to produce autonomous totems and wall-based and free-hanging reliefs. British-Ghanaian artist Hilda Kortei approaches painting as an intuitive process of construction and revision, creating richly layered compositions in which abstraction, fragmentation and materiality converge through colour, gesture and the physical act of making. For Near to the Wild Heart, Kortei presents two paintings (both 2026) that combine hand-sewn canvas, assemblage and expressive mark-making to create compositions that are both bold and open-ended. Areas of exposed canvas and irregular edges interrupt the picture plane, lending the paintings a raw physicality and an openness that resists fixed interpretation. Painting onto pieces of salvaged scrap wood (sometimes on both sides), the late American artist Bill Lynch depicted birds, animals, blossoming branches, waterfalls, Chinese vases, statuettes and landscapes. The artist's loaded, seemingly spontaneous brushstrokes betray his investment in Chinese and Japanese painting whilst evoking his American roots. His confident gestures combine a dry lambent brush and thick pasty paint. The moiré woodgrain on the rough boards are often absorbed into his compositions, becoming a still body of water or suggesting a moving sky. Knots and grain in the wood seem to inspire the superimposition of moons, mushrooms, flowers or vessels. Having grown up between Japan and China, Kentaro Okumura draws on memories of travel and lived experience to create his paintings. Shaped by both Eastern and Western traditions, he uses painting to translate sensations and recollections into image. Broad gestures, layered surfaces and loosely defined forms allow atmosphere to take precedence over narrative. In Near to the Wild Heart, motifs such as a red sun and organic shapes emerge through washes of colour and passages of thick paint. Earthy tones, scraped surfaces and moments of exposed canvas create compositions that remain open and shifting, where memories and associations are allowed to surface gradually. Since the mid-1990s, Belgian artist Carole Vanderlinden has developed a painting practice that embraces what she describes as "a mix of genres" and the coming together of unlikely elements. Informed by Dutch painting, European modernism and folk traditions, she uses thick brushwork, fragments of collage and apparently spontaneous lines that lend her paintings an ambiguousness where symbols and bodies drift between recognition and invention. Her paintings remain open-ended and playful, reflecting an enduring belief in painting's capacity to connect disparate forms and ideas. British artist Sam Windett's practice is driven by processes of layering, collage, accumulation, and continual revision, through which materials are repeatedly reworked and transformed. Recurring motifs such as windows, orbs and geometric divisions, act as shifting points of reference, evoking light, memory and place. Exit, Meadow and Glider II (all 2026), extend this language through fragmented surfaces and luminous circular forms, balancing material experimentation with subtle allusion to landscape and the passage of time.