Ella Kruglyanskaya
Shadows
28 Feb - 3 May 2025

 

Private view: Thursday 27 February, 6–8pm

 

Thomas Dane Gallery

11 Duke Street, St James’s, London SW1

 

 

In February 2025, Thomas Dane Gallery will present an exhibition of new paintings by Ella Kruglyanskaya (b. 1978, Riga, Latvia), the first in a series of three exhibitions across the year, with the second opening in Basel at Contemporary Fine Arts in June and the third in the autumn in New York at Bortolami Gallery. Kruglyanskaya’s forthcoming monograph, Too Much, will be published by Pacific to coincide with the opening of her Thomas Dane Gallery exhibition.

 

Entitled Shadows, Kruglyanskaya’s exhibition will assemble a group of new paintings and drawings that both honour and question the legacy of the artists and experiences that have shaped her practice. Drawing on the works of Josef Albers, Édouard Manet, Juan Sánchez Cotán, Anthea Hamilton, René Magritte as well as the numerous representations of odalisques in art’s history, Kruglyanskaya’s new works explore the nature of artistic influence and the enduring conversation about the future of painting.

 

Kruglyanskaya’s many frames of reference encompass textile design, graphic arts and the histories of painting. These histories are often amusingly reformulated within large-scale portraits which combine cartoonish and sardonic figures with elements of still life, playing on the tradition of memento mori. In Everyone and Their Mortality (2024) Kruglyanskaya translates contemporary ideograms into trompe l’oeil, and places these symbols in familiar art historical scenes, wherein her humour undercuts scenes of emotional tension or confrontation.

 

In her new body of work, the long shadows cast by the light entering Kruglyanskaya’s New York studio reframe the images created by her painterly influences, or are dappled across rushing female figures and overlaid with references to technology, both evolving and obsolete. These acts of homage are destabilised by satirical or double entendre titles that call into question our contemporary ways of seeing and making.

 

Ella Kruglyanskaya lives and works in New York. Selected solo exhibitions include: This is a Robbery, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, England (2020); Ella Kruglyanskaya, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2018); Ella Kruglyanskaya, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, England (2016); Fancy Problems, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, England (2015); Grafika, The Power Station, Dallas TX (2014); How to work together, Studio Voltaire residency and show, London, England (2014). Selected group exhibitions include: Pictus Porrectus: Reconsidering the Full-Length Portrait, Isaac Bell House, Providence RI (2022); New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley CA (2022); The Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts 2019, Ljubljana, Slovenia; Baltic Triennial 2018, Contemporary Art Centre, Villinus, Lithuania; Ella Kruglyanskaya & Matt Paweski, Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico (2018); Tainted Love, Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France (2017) and Little Vera, kim? (with Sanya Kantarovsky), Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Latvia (2014).

 

For exhibitions and sales enquiries please contact:

François Chantala: francois@thomasdanegallery.com

Phoebe Roberts: phoebe@thomasdanegallery.com

 

For press enquiries please contact:

Thomas Dane Gallery, Patrick Shier: patrick@thomasdanegallery.com

 

 

Ella Kruglyanskaya, Adventure (in Gray), 2022 © Ella Kruglyanskaya. Photo: Mark Woods.