Eve Ackroyd

Turn Gallery is pleased to present Second Body, Eve Ackroyd’s first solo exhibition in the gallery’s main space.

Ackroyd seeks out stories of female friendship and motherhood, celebrating sublime and intimate moments of quotidian life. She treats the figure—whether human or otherwise—as a vessel through which to explore candor and humor, secrets and surprise. Ackroyd’s paintings convey sensuality and stillness, exploring an interplay between the elusive gazes of viewer and subject. Her rich color palette and sinuous forms transfigure memories of familial and platonic connection into an ethereal world of mutual recognition and wordless conviviality.

In this new series of paintings, Ackroyd draws inspiration from Daisy Hildyard’s essay collection The Second Body, exploring the body’s simultaneous role as a home for inner subjectivity and as a vehicle for communication with a wider social and natural world:

“Every living thing has two bodies… You breathe something in, and what you breathe out is something else. Your first body is the place you live in, made out of your own personal skin. Your second body is not so solid as the other one, but much larger. This second body is your own literal and physical biological existence—it is a version of you.”

—Daisy Hildyard

Softly emerging from velvety fields of color, Ackroyd’s lone animals, dinner party guests, and new mothers look out for one another amid a shared nocturnal landscape, conjuring bonds both imagined and real.

Eve Ackroyd is a painter from the United Kingdom. She studied painting at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, and at Weissensee School of Art in Berlin. Her paintings have been featured in Turn Gallery’s Parlour Room in 2022, and in two-person and group exhibitions at Galerie Hussenot, Paris; Cob Gallery, London; White Columns, New York; CCA Andratx, Majorca; and Kapp Kapp, Philadelphia. Eve Ackroyd lives and works in London, England.