Artists

Kat Lyons

Press release

Pilar Corrias presents The Familiars, an exhibition of new paintings by Kat Lyons that examines how animals have shaped the human world materially, technologically and philosophically. The works consider animals' shifting presence in daily life, as they recede from direct experience into increasingly unseen realms, replaced by images, caricatures and mediated versions of their former roles. Lyons reflects on animals' status as both defunct tools within human systems and as intimate companions who persist at the edges of cultural memory. Through this dual lens, The Familiars explores absence, labour and the evolving relationship between human and nonhuman life. Each of the exhibition's works is rooted in a specific historical and scientific context, such as The Electric Body, a portrait of a frog which references the 1780s electrical experiments of Italian physician Luigi Galvani. Galvani's work on reanimation shaped early ideas about life and technology that were later echoed in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Drawing on these histories, Lyons foregrounds animals' contributions at the frontier of technological experimentation, often as the first to physically and psychologically experience its effects. Civil Square deanimates the subject: a large elephant stands among buildings, stabilised by visible infrastructure mid-assembly, highlighting the history of elephants as popular spectacles in city centres. The Invisible Island is a portrait of a group of rhesus macaques living in a primate research facility on Cayo Santiago off the coast of Puerto Rico. The small island was established in 1938 as a research colony, and the monkeys have lived there for generations, participating — knowingly or not — in scientific studies on social behaviour, cognition and disease. Kat Lyons (b. 1989) lives and works in London.