Of Mere Being
14 – 24 June, 2024
KuLe Gallery
10 Augustrasse 10117, Berlin

Exhibition catalogue here.

Of Mere Being is an exploration of the disconnectedness that has permeated human relationships across the last few years. It is both a meditation on that disconnection and a space for seeking respite from its pervasive tentacles.

In Room one, 120 collages and 120 hand-painted golden blocks offer a visual caesura and space for emotional and intellectual solace. The collages draw on the Dada and Surrealist movements of the early twentieth century, in their aesthetics as well as in their explorations of the unexpected in the everyday. In Room Two hang 14 large mixed-media paintings best described as visual stories where humour and joy sit side-by-side with the shadows they cast.

With Of Mere Being, Gory continues an ongoing interest in uncovering what is hidden through the act of revelation. Deliberately courting ambiguity and contradiction through the repeated motifs of fragmented body parts, women and elements of the natural world, her often-surreal images speak of desire, longing, angst and the power of transformation—Of Mere Being is an exhibition that speaks to both the artist’s interior worlds and the world at large. On the walls between the works, hand-written in graphite, are poems that have inspired Gory as she worked, offering her provocation and respite in equal measure.

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Helen Gory is an Australian artist working across various mediums including collage, mixed media and ceramics. She has had solo exhibitions in Melbourne and New York, and was the founder and owner of the renowned Helen Gory Gallery.

* The title of this exhibition, Of Mere Being, is borrowed from the poem of the same name by Wallace Stevens, 1955.