Vestige

Gegee Ayurzana

My-Lan Hoang-Thuy

Tobias Thaens

Generous in materiality, Gegee Ayurzana is at once inward and intimate in her unruly and meandering brushwork. Working primarily with oil on cut canvas or wooden panels, her organic forms appear to push against the edges of themselves. She constructs gestural passages that hold a corporeal presence, slices of muddled reality materialised, the physical manifestation of something that exists elsewhere.

In an almost reductivist logic, her practice signals towards radical modernist painting, concerning formal and symbolic values, metaphor and spirituality, chance and seriality, an interplay between structuring and abandonment. Combining the intellectual with an emotional vernacular, Ayurzana discreetly references the nomadic drift and contingent narratives of her native Mongolia - physical landscapes, psychological experience and immaterial existence that tend to personal and collective needs. Her works oscillate between resolution and irresolution, seeking something more mysterious and animistic.

My-Lan Hoang-Thuy’s paintings appear in a state of becoming with the potential for self-revelation. As pictorial planes overlap, both texture and atmosphere veer towards one another, she structures pearlescent terrains of moods. Shaped through a continual and nuanced experimentation with materials, her dried acrylic substrates exist as both form and content, they offer the opportunity to gather boundless dialogues and allusions. Her process is seemingly contradictory - accidental but anti-intuitive, dismantling established hierarchies of production - shapes dissolve and appear, centre spills against outline; inside destabilises outside.

As paint daubs accumulate and colours vaporise, Hoang-Thuy works with pleasure in the gap between abstraction and narrative. There is a sense of living in someone else’s mind, her mind, as she materialises the fluctuant workings of memory.

Voiding, concealing, subtractive in their delicate translucency, Tobias Thaens’ paintings suggest a passage from one state to the next. They are a double vision, a double speech, liminal in nature and stammering on the cusp of evaporating.

Thaens’ compositions are informed by the biological - the structures within an organism’s eye, patterns of camouflage, the possibilities of perceiving echolocation. Works are shaped through repeated processes of erasure, the residual lines and colour hues that are left after tints of oil are wiped away.

His works act as points of orientation, purposefully void of certitude. They are not in a place, but between places, we confront transience. Thaens implies our limits of knowledge and an endless curiosity in perception, the vast expanse of everything that isn’t there to be understood, and how the act of seeing alters what is seen.

In the works of Gegee Ayurzana, My-Lan Hoang-Thuy and Tobias Thaens we arrive in the middle, what happened previously is pointedly indeterminate and what comes after we are left to speculate on. Remnants and suggestions, vestiges, permeate their processes and outcomes. At times their structures resist definition, and with this delirious tension between knowing and not-knowing, they remind us of the importance of our sensory capacity.

Gegee Ayurzana (b. 1998, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) has previously exhibited works at NIKA, Paris; Willie, Amsterdam; Van Zijl Langhout, Amsterdam; Limburg Biennale, Marres, Maastricht; Kieken Centrale, Antwerp. In 2023, she completed a two year residency at De Ateliers, Amsterdam.

My-Lan Hoang-Thuy (b. 1990, Bourg-la-Reine, France) Selected exhibitions include: Galerie Mitterrand, Paris; Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris; FRAC Grand Large Hauts-de-France, Dunkerque; Paradise Row, London; Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne, Saint-Étienne; Centre Pompidou, Paris. Public collections include: FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand; FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Bordeaux. In 2024, Hoang-Thuy will be included in the exhibition I Hit You With a Flower at Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam.

Tobias Thaens (b. 1999, Eindhoven, The Netherlands) has previously exhibited works at No Man’s Art Gallery, Amsterdam; Gerhard Hofland, Amsterdam. In 2023, he completed a two year residency at De Ateliers, Amsterdam. In 2024, Thaens was awarded the prestigious Royal Award for Modern Painting, The Netherlands.