Velocity: Isabella Amram, Ximena Fuentes, Botond Keresztesi, Zigsen Liu, Jeremy Olson, Lukáš Šmejkal
Velocity brings together six international artists whose practices engage painting as a site of transformation—where bodies, symbols, architectures, and landscapes slip between states, scales, and temporalities. Across abstraction and figuration, these artists explore how images accumulate, fracture, and reconfigure meaning in an era shaped by accelerated perception and shifting realities.
At the heart of the exhibition is a shared sensitivity to instability: between figure and ground, past and present, and physical and virtual space. Rather than offering fixed narratives, the works in Velocity propose painting as a fluid system—one that absorbs cultural debris, historical references, technological conditions, and personal experience, recomposing them into open-ended visual fields.
Zigsen Liu’s new series Mutual Gaze interrogates orientation, legibility, and spatial multiplicity. Designed to remain visually coherent when inverted, these paintings destabilize the hierarchy of top and bottom, encouraging viewers to encounter shifting readings from different perspectives. Liu’s work reflects a broader investigation into contemporary subjectivity—one shaped by constant reorientation, overlapping viewpoints, and the collapse of stable visual anchors.
Isabella Amram approaches painting as an embodied record of time and sensation. Through layering, erasure, and iterative mark-making, her surfaces become sites of accumulation and release. Asemic lines and fragmented forms generate rhythm and movement, while her recent engagement with Tarot structures introduces systems of chance and sequence as frameworks for intuitive, process-led composition. Her paintings oscillate between control and surrender, suggesting meaning as something continuously forming rather than resolved.
Jeremy Olson’s detailed panel paintings and sculptures depict interiors and architectures populated by uncanny presences and speculative tools. Swimming pools, playgrounds, and domestic spaces become stages for quiet estrangement, where everyday rituals are infused with alien logic. His practice probes the entanglement of techno-capital, futurism, and post-human imaginaries, revealing how technological desire quietly permeates intimate environments.
Botond Keresztesi constructs flamboyantly absurd pictorial worlds where art history, pop culture, corporate visuality, and speculative fiction collide. His paintings stage improbable encounters between motifs drawn from disparate epochs, producing paradoxical spaces that feel simultaneously familiar and estranged. Humor and irony function as critical tools, exposing the slippage between image and meaning in a post-truth visual economy.
Lukáš Šmejkal traces the porous boundary between body and terrain, composing lyrical assemblages in which human figures dissolve into landscapes threaded by pylons, pathways, and vertical axes. Drawing on photography, movement, and Baroque conceptions of spatial tension, his work reflects on how contemporary technologies—satellites, mapping systems, and mobile networks—reshape our perception of land and orientation. Landscape becomes not only a physical site, but also a psychological and informational one.
Ximena Fuentes creates otherworldly landscapes through luminous watercolour techniques, producing compositions that feel simultaneously fragmented and whole. Her environments hover between dreamlike terrains and psychological spaces, where color and atmosphere dissolve fixed spatial coordinates. The resulting works invite slow looking, privileging sensation and emotional resonance over literal description.
Together, the artists in Velocity articulate painting as a field of ongoing negotiation—between intuition and structure, materiality and illusion, immediacy and memory. The exhibition proposes velocity not only as speed, but as a condition of constant becoming: images in motion, meanings in flux, and perception itself as an active, unstable force.
