Eve Ackroyd

Parlour Room

Turn Gallery is pleased to present Eve Ackroyd’s Fifth Floor Apartment. This marks Ackroyd’s first solo exhibition in New York.

With her distinctive bold fields of color, Ackroyd explores how our bodies negotiate the worlds of physical space and memory alike. She depicts people and animals in intensely personal situations that nonetheless evoke wider contexts. In Fifth Floor Apartment, memories of her life in New York are combined with images both real and imagined, while her figures are left isolated and devoid of immediate context. Much as our physical spaces hold certain similarities, so too do our mental narratives.

Moments we spend in our apartments are simultaneously personal and shared experiences. Time is fluid and space becomes immaterial – how many instances have we sat at this particular table? Watched children slowly grow up? Become older ourselves? How many others have done and are doing the same? Memories themselves blur with the passage of time – what was recorded by our senses seems to have already changed from the distance of just a year.

The first round of paintings was created in New York during the spring of 2020. After relocating to London the summer of that year, I then created a second series that reimagined time spent in particular locations – in the bath or a corner of my Brooklyn apartment. Like those memories, the paintings began to bleed into each other and are presented here together. Some of the earlier images eerily prefigure later counterpoints – a dog that appears in the first series bears an uncanny resemblance to a family pet that did not exist until the time of the latter, like an echo of the future. Sense and place become one and the same.

—Eve Ackroyd

Eve Ackroyd has recently exhibited at Assembly Room, New York, NY; Cob Gallery, London; Cindy Rucker Gallery, New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY.