Stevie Dix

Stevie Dix’s second solo exhibition at the gallery presents a new body of paintings which emerge from a compressed period in her life where anticipation and grief unfolded side by side.

Titled after both her mother and her son, Dix’s new paintings in Vyvyan explore the quiet symmetry of an ending that coincided with a beginning. Reflecting on the two weeks between her mother’s death and her son’s birth, the paintings reckon with intense feelings of being suspended between the two events. Rather than narrating these experiences directly, the paintings focus on the imagery, objects and symbols connecting them.

Flowers form a parallel thread throughout the exhibition. Objects of celebration and condolence, they operate as unstable symbols – cut and technically lifeless yet kept upright and vibrant in water. After her mother’s death the artist revisited an old book documenting her mother’s own ceramic works, each piece staged with floral arrangements. Selected from this book, the flower which repeats across several of the linen canvases appears between states – at one moment its petals unfurling, and at another wilting. Representing tensions between life and death; grief and joy, the flowers in Dix’s paintings emerge from her signature short brushstrokes and reverberate with energy.

Elsewhere, the familiar outline of the flower becomes an entangled web of crimson strands. Unsteadily winding across the canvases, the intricate network of channels is an example of anatomical elements introduced to the visual language of this new body of works. In two paintings, Sattler’s flower, hypertension and Beside your body #1 , these forms appear in microscopic detail, akin to blood-filled veins, or a cluster of cells. Looping from one edge of the canvas to another, the webs repeat the same journey across multiple works – growing outwards from the centre to meet two circular forms which otherwise remain separate. Heavy with symbolism, the dreamlike paintings are evocative of reproductive anatomy, electromagnetic fields, suns, planets and flowers – exploring the overlap between matter on different scales: cosmic, biological, human.

Painted in Dix’s distinctive impasto style using oils and beeswax, this new body of work remains loyal to her earthy, muted palette. Structurally too, she continues to explore assemblages of multiple canvases. These totem-like storyboards together depict a chronology without a definitive narrative. Evocative of tiers in comics, the sequences feel climactic in their construction of a single moment containing multiple perspectives. Made up of three individual paintings, Vivian & Vyvyan #1 presents the familiar flower motif doubled in the same frame. Above and below the central canvas, two smaller paintings capture segments of the same scene. Referred to as ‘the sun’ and ‘the earth’ by Dix, the head and tail of this composition again draw symmetries between the body – personal and private, and the world outside.

Delicately tracing the ironies between losing her mother and becoming a mother within such a short space of time, the works in Vyvyan allow a suspension of beliefs around these transitional events, embracing what remains unknowable about them.

By incorporating flowers into the exhibition, Dix draws together celebration and mourning without dramatisation. They function less as decoration than as carriers of dual meaning – gestures toward birth as much as toward death. The central subject of this new body of work, the flower in Vyvyan serves as a symbol for consciousness, giving form to that which is unstable and uncertain.

Stevie Dix (b. 1990, Genk, BE. Lives and works in Genk, BE) Recent solo exhibitions include Drift!, Carlier | Gebauer, Berlin, DE (2026); A Season in Hell, Super Dakota, Brussels, BE (2025); Chaos, Carlier | Gebauer, Madrid, ES (2025); Starburst , L21 Barcelona, Barcelona, ES (2023); Beside Ourselves, Galerie Chloe Salgado, Paris, FR (2022); Tennis Elbow, The Journal Gallery, New York, US (2022); Magnesium, Hannah Barry Gallery, London, UK (2021); Sad Girl Surrealism, L21 S’escorxador, Palma de Mallorca, ES (2021); and Belgian Techno, Nevven Gallery, Göteborg, SE (2020). Recent group shows include Table Manners, Barbati Gallery, Venice, IT (2026); Flat Volume, A.P.T Gallery, London, UK (2025); Tainted Love, Super Dakota, Brussels, BE (2024); Sin Centre, Hannah Barry Gallery, London, UK (2024); Menschenbild, Carlier | Gebauer, Madrid, ES (2024); Entre Cajas, L21 Gallery, Palma de Mallorca, ES (2023); Coal and Birc, Outpost, Copenhagen, DK (2023); Spring without End, Hannah Barry Gallery, London, UK (2023); Walking, running, falling, L21 Gallery, Palma de Mallorca, ES (2022); Villeggiatura, Nevven Gallery, Cascina Gilli, Castelnuovo Don Bosco, IT (2022); The Views , Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles, US (2022); Finis Terrae, Het einde. Een begin, Gallery Geukens & De Vil, Antwerp, BE (2022).