Artists

Nils Alix-Tabeling, Łukasz Stokłosa

Press release

Ghosts and Gods brings together Łukasz Stokłosa and Nils Alix-Tabeling around a shared interest in what happens to myths, images and forms of belief when they move beyond the worlds that first gave them meaning. Rather than treating the past as something fixed, both artists return to it as a material that can be transformed, inhabited and made strange again. Alix-Tabeling's sculptures and installations bring together pagan figures, folklore, ritual, queer histories, animals and the body. His works often seem to exist between sculpture and character, object and living presence. They draw on traditions in which objects are dressed, cared for or understood as vessels for another presence, while materials associated with different forms of value are brought together: precious stones and pearls alongside shells, vegetation, hair, paper and found materials. Myth here is not an illustration of an old story. It is a way of giving form to histories and forms of knowledge that have been marginalised or erased. His research into witchcraft and the witch trials, informed in part by Silvia Federici, has led him to consider how histories are constructed through incomplete archives, and how fiction, ritual and the imagination might offer ways of approaching what those archives leave out. Stokłosa's paintings begin from another kind of inheritance. Historical interiors, religious figures, aristocratic gardens, old-master painting and cinematic imagery return as fragments of worlds that have already disappeared. His paintings do not reconstruct these worlds so much as stage their afterlife. A palace becomes a theatrical set; a religious figure becomes an image charged with new desires; a historical scene becomes something remembered rather than witnessed. His work around Saint Sebastian, for example, follows the transformation of a Christian martyr into a queer icon, demonstrating how an image can acquire entirely new meanings through time. He has also described his Dynasty paintings as a form of “calling up ghosts,” connecting them to the Polish tradition of Dziady, in which the living summon the dead. The exhibition therefore moves between two forms of return. Alix-Tabeling brings forgotten figures, rituals and beliefs back into physical presence, giving them new bodies and possibilities. Stokłosa works with images that already carry the traces of their former lives, allowing their meanings to become unstable and their histories to surface again as memory, desire and fantasy. In Ghosts and Gods, myth is less a subject than a method: a way of moving between past and present, belief and invention, disappearance and revival. What has been lost is not simply recovered. It returns altered. Nils Alix-Tabeling (b. 1991, Paris, FR) lives and works in Montargis, FR. He holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London (2016). Working across sculpture, performance and installation, Alix-Tabeling reconfigures traditional narratives of religious worship through queer bodies, pagan ritual, séance and the occult. Using materials including bronze, carved wood, peacock feathers, pearls and dried lotus flowers, his work brings together the sacred and the transgressive, exploring pleasure, perversion and taboo while proposing alternative forms of kinship between natural forms and rebellious bodies. Recent exhibitions include after Judea Sill, 4 songs for 1 catabasis, CCCOD Tours, Tours (2025); The Resonant Shelter, with Michel Jocaille, Poush, Paris (2025); But Who Is Ulrike Mandrake?, Piktogram, Warsaw (2024); Contemporary Myths and Artefacts, Stockholm Gasverket, Stockholm (2023); and Blue of Noon, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2022). Łukasz Stokłosa (b. 1986, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, PL) lives and works in Kraków, PL. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 2010. Working primarily in painting, Stokłosa explores history and the past through their contemporary cultural and pop-cultural interpretations. His practice is rooted in the history of painting, drawing on historical imagery and art-historical references to examine how history is narrated and how these narratives shape the present and collective memory. His paintings consider the ways historical images and cultural references are continually reinterpreted, revealing the shifting relationship between the past and the present.