AN SE EUN

MARIA EZCURRA

ANTONIETTA GRASSI

KIM SIYEON

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15.01.2025 — 07.03.2025

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​Echoing the Australian writer and feminist Germaine Greer’s seminal reflections on the social and patriarchal constraints that have long overshadowed women’s creative ambitions, four mid-career women practitioners from Canada and Korea explore the entanglement of art, gender, and age from a transregional perspective, navigating between expectations and limitations. Rather than focusing on discrimination, ageism, or the forces of capitalism, this exchange sheds light on the artists’ persistent act of reclamation and defiance - of identity, of voice, of artistic territory. Fifty years after Linda Nochlin - a prominent American feminist and art historian- first posited how institutional barriers of education, patronage, and social conditioning precluded women from full visibility, the echoes of that exclusion still linger and inform these artists’ vision, as they actively transform it into matter, gesture, and form.

 

Working across a range of forms and techniques - from painting, embroidery, sculpture to site-specific installations and photography - An Se Eun, Maria Ezcurra, Antonietta Grassi and Kim Siyeon imagine modalities that, while shaped by domestic and temporal limitations, draw profound inspiration from them. The charge of responsibility, often leaving little time or space for creation, becomes the source of a quiet resilience - born out of repetition and care. In crafting art from the interstices of everyday life, their work reveals how these hindrances can ultimately be generative. The exhibition then becomes a space to question how the intersectionality of gender, class, race, and sexuality weaves through the conditions of making and seeing, determining not only their practice but also the ways it is received, valued, and remembered.

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Unwavering and resolute, these women defy societal conditioning by not conforming to the conventions of contemporary art as they carve out fleeting moments of respite - both literal and metaphorical. Within this stolen time, they seem to find solace not in completion but in process - in the slow unfolding of repetitive gestures. Their works emerge as dense, a-temporal meditations: subversive transfigurations of the mundane, where the overlooked is exalted, and the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Unhinged from the demands of the market, they often produce without the need for a studio or the pressure of deadlines, their work informed by family interactions. Small, reusable, accessible and inexpensive - ready-made and unconventional materials and techniques often replace traditional artistic media.

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Maria Ezcurra’s Exquisite Corpses presents fragmented, playful, and mythological feminine figures -drawn, sewn, and embroidered onto fabrics from home décor books. Twenty bodies, at once abstract and symbolic, emerge from textiles once used as upholstery samples. Through cutting, stitching, and reassembling, Ezcurra conflates drawing and embroidery, blurring boundaries between art and craft, public and private, visual and tactile. The figures unravel and reform, reflecting the female body as a site and symbol of transformation.

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Similarly, Kim’s installations and photographs reveal a meticulous, process-driven practice rooted in care and reiteration. Her sculptures, shaped from eraser crumbs gathered during her daughter’s writing lessons, become poetic relics of maternal labour -humble residues turned essential. Through collecting and reshaping fragile materials, Ezcurra and Kim elevate the overlooked and the feminine, transforming the everyday into quiet acts of resistance and renewal.

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Antonietta Grassi’s lines and An Se Eun’s written texts reveal an adaptive sensibility - a subconscious urge to control through structure and rhythm. The frailty of contemporary relationships are the focus of An’s series When We Talk About Love, as she delves into the subtle and often imperceptible nuances of human connections. A single phrase uttered like a mantra and transferred on a canvas in a particular disposition, ultimately morphs into shapes often alluding to banal disposable objects -like coasters and doilies-, and a metaphor for inevitable transience. Having lived across the world, An laments the instability of communication and the disconnection that arises from countless encounters and farewells. A single phrase - often spoken and seldom remembered - here echoes modern relationships - quickly formed and easily dissolved. 

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Grassi’s Modulations, deliberate and rhythmic, also evoke a quiet meditation on transience. She both surrenders and controls. Her strung lines are methodically repeated, gradually distilling into emptiness. The essence of her practice lies in fact not in the finished image but in the sustained act of making - a ritual of continuity within impermanence. For both artists, painting represents perhaps a form of solace and resistance: uncertainty is reconciled through the cadence of the brush. Their maximalist compositions - dense with modular elements, chromatic tension, and optical play - teeter between representation and abstraction, reflecting a shared desire to find order within chaos.

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NOT CONFORMED highlights how these women reclaim their power, as they defy the systemic hierarchies that intend to silence them. Their art is an inspiring performance of resistance where the domestic becomes radical and the ordinary, sublime.​​

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