Georgia Gardner Gray

Georgia Gardner Gray presents NDE, an exhibition of new works, spanning painting, sculpture and theatre – marking her first solo presentation in the UK. Referring to the phenomenon of a ‘Near Death Experience’, her tableau recalibrates the simulacra of modernity alongside supernatural elements, to evoke a shifting paradigm away from fetishized objects and disembodied moods – to immanent rapture. The body of work centres on an exploration of the everyday incidents, labours and archetypes that constitute life now; pursuing an open-ended narrative composed by ubiquitous consumer products, stock imagery, somatic and psychological states, marked by brief memetic punchlines. Through these scenographies Gardner Gray attempts to probe our system of belief, staging pert encounters with the binary symbols that we read: seedy, respectable, educated, uneducated, subversive, conformist, real, imaginary, etc. She reveals the pervasive social maps for passing temporal judgement.

The eponymously titled play NDE (Near Death Experience) opens with the near death of a wounded soldier in an unspecified future World War. He finds himself in an out-of-body experience, travelling through scenes of his brief life. Puncturing the rhapsodic, the highfalutin themes commingle with the petty microaggressions of everyday modern life.

Georgia Gardner Gray (b. 1988, New York NY) graduated with a BFA Cooper Union for the Science and Art, New York, in 2011. She has had solo exhibitions at institutions including Kunsthalle Lingen, Lingen (2018); UKS/Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2017); and Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg (2017). In addition, she has also participated in group shows including those at Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021); Kunsthalle, Bern (2021); Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn (2019). She has staged performances with the Volksbuehne, Berlin; (2018) and with Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2019). In 2018 Gardner Gray was awarded the Lingen Art Prize, dedicated to emerging artists who work in the medium of painting. She lives and works in Berlin.