Nothing to Hide
Curators Room, Barcelona
John Fou, Calli Moore, Julia Kowalska, Adam Linn & Virginia Paradise
May 18th 2023 - June 24th 2023
Oosterhof weaves a narrative that privileges artists who dare to show their palms in their work; their secrets, fantasies, fears, desires, soft and hard spots that speak to their sincerity and daring natures.
A series of paintings and one sculpture constitute the exciting range of challenging aesthetics and uncanny inner-worlds that effuse over the five artists’ work.
According to the curator, this willingness to be open and to speak from highly personal spaces is not as common of a trait as it may seem. Some distance themselves from placing personal narratives at the forefront of their work.
In Nothing to Hide, as the title aptly suggests, this is not the case. Spiritual iconography mingle with moments of corporal tenderness; rich purples dialogue with saturate pinks and golden hums; sublime swashes of colour and light dance in abstract landscapes; foggy aethers help to convalesce old wounds and thorny realities.
As the curator narrates, “Nothing to Hide picks up from where the last show, The Garden, left off which similarly tackled the use of daring and fearless subject matter in contemporary painting. It was also rooted in giving protagonism to the strength of the artists and their individual visions. In the case of the current show, I was interested in softening the atmosphere by employing a criteria that sought out more vulnerable imagery.” - Gabriel V. Luciani.