Artists

Groupshow

Press release

In Marfa, Texas, there is a mysterious optical phenomenon called the Marfa lights. The first observation of the Marfa lights was recorded in 1883, when a young cowhand saw a flickering light in the distance. He thought it could be a fire from a campsite, but found nothing when he went to investigate. Since then, these strange floating lights, which change in intensity and color, have been regularly observed at this particular spot in the desert. The lights have prompted scientific investigation, but there has been no final conclusion on what causes them. For some, they are the ghosts of conquistadors or Indians, for others evidence of UFO’s. James Dean supposedly became obsessed with the lights while shooting a film in the desert, and would spend hours looking for them through a telescope from his hotel window. The artists in this exhibition capture something that can be perceived but that resists denomination. Their work is reaching towards an image, a form, or a sensation but never quite arriving. You kind of want to zoom out, or squint your eyes, or turn up the sharpness. Detail is privileged, and yet it feels as if you are missing something. Like observing moving discs of light in a dark desert sky and not knowing where they came from, or seeing a familiar object from a strange angle. You blink and it’s gone, but an imprint lingers on your retina. A flipped reality. Mel Chin’s animation work Marfa Memento Mori (2011) acts as a kind of prologue in this exhibition. It uses photographs of the Marfa lights phenomenon posted online, which the artist printed and attached to a custom animation stand. Using white chalk, he draws, smudges and erases light on top of the images, recording the process with a digital video camera. The outline of a human skull gradually appears on the horizon. The work interrupts an already weird physical reality with an intervention that combines digital and analogue techniques, expressing an ambiguity inherent to perception and interpretation. Without using words, the work also alludes to the conspiracy theories that circulate about the Marfa lights, most likely in the very online forums where the artist sourced his images. In his book The Flip (2019), Jeffrey J. Kripal explains the transmission thesis, which sees the brain as a superevolved neurological system that receives different signals — like flipping between radio stations — and is therefore able to know and experience “things distant in space and time”. This is a possible approach to so-called supernatural occurrences, near-death experiences and dreams that forecast the future — instead of dismissing these as irrational or coincidental, we can accept them as a layer of reality, as a radio frequency. In relation to art making, this implies that artists can channel transmissions from outside of themselves back into their work, and that the process of making work is a fundamentally unpredictable interaction between mind and matter. “the eye eyes the eye” brings together artists whose image-making practices challenge questions of authority and the accessibility of reality-as-such. Maria Toumazou’s works engage in a layering of realities using the medium of photography. Daylight (2025) is a panel of photographs depicting crystal cubes laser-engraved with baby photos. The artist noticed them in the window display of a photo shop and shot them through the glass using an old and barely functioning camera. A newborn child is a kind of mysterious miracle, tender and eerie all at once, a tension that the artist draws out through the distortion of the original object. In other works, she photographs architectural details from unfamiliar angles, recalling x-rays or mug shots. The zig-zag of a grille in close-up appears to show a heart rate, a panel of wooden furnishing becomes flesh-like. These works connect the banal and lifeless to vibrations of birth and death, pointing to a connected universe in which meaning lingers everywhere you look. Jan Hüskes creates his works through a process of pictorial and material experimentation. He is interested in “how collective forces become internalised”. The layering of systems and events that conditions a landscape, a family, a psyche, all connected and feeding into one another. In line with the process of making the work, where a long period of preparation and testing precedes a quick and compressed moment of application, Hüskes’ compositions contain dense concentrations of energy, balanced out by fields of colour and geometrical structures. Neighbour 1 & 2 and Neighbour 2 & 1 (both 2026) are like mirror images, two ways of looking at the same thing. As Hüskes moves between techniques used in printmaking, drawing, and sculpture, he compares these works to frescoes, where pigment is likewise absorbed by plaster and becomes an integral part of the material. Sarah Księska’s paintings are amalgamations of organic and constructed forms. Applying thin layers of oil over silver leaf on aluminium, the artist brings objects and figures into appearance. Their outlines melt and disintegrate into the surroundings, a constant exchange between body and environment. In the larger painting, Field I (2026), areas of silver remain exposed and respond directly to changes in light and viewpoint. In the smaller work, Point (2026), the silver is concealed beneath the paint and presents itself as an irregular, subtly fractured surface. In both paintings, the silver leaf functions not simply as a background but as an active material condition of the image. This resonates with how the artist sees the body: not as a fixed entity but as a porous state, “the self is formed by what it cannot hold outside of itself”. These works reach beyond a duality of ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’, focusing on the unstable conditions through which bodies, objects and images come into appearance. Amelie Karweick constructs her sculptures from industrial steel components, subjecting them to processes of bending, welding, hammering, grinding, and polishing. Through these successive interventions, she alters not only their physical form but also the character of their surfaces. Karweick repeatedly reorients and reconfigures her works, while giving particular attention to the way each sculpture rests on the floor. This emphasis on movement and balance recalls the logic of an aircraft: a dense, complex structure whose form is governed by the precise distribution of weight, surface, and force. Against this physical and technically demanding sculptural practice, Karweick’s drawings introduce a different register. Their architectural and spatial compositions appear less concerned with the weight of objects than with the conditions through which space is imagined, remembered, and constructed. At the same time, the drawings retain a certain fragility that resonates with the abrasions, distortions, and traces of force visible across the surfaces of her sculptures. The artists in this exhibition call into question the idea of the eye as an objective instrument that transmits information of the world ‘out there’ into our minds ‘in here’. Instead, they posit the eye as an unpredictable filter between consciousness and the universe. It follows that artworks are not one-way messages from a source to a receiver, but living objects entangled in webs of signals, meanings and narratives, making the world we inhabit all the more interesting and strange. Brenda Guesnet