HEAVEN’S CHAMBERS
15 April - 20 May 2023
CARVALHO PARK is thrilled to announce the opening of Heaven’s Chambers, London-based artist Yulia Iosilzon’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Underneath the shimmering surfaces of Iosilzon’s large-scale and luminous paintings on silk and cotton, lies an entire genealogy of flood fantasies. By way of her singular and calligraphic line, Iosilzon references the Jewish symbols of her heritage and Renaissance precedents, sifting through images, compositions, color palettes, and narrative devices, to arrive at a fresh means of representing the divine. Heaven’s Chambers opens on April 15 and will remain on view until May 20, 2023.
Immersed in watery environments, in possession of hybrid anatomies that mix delicately featured human faces and sinewy animal bodies, Iosilzon recasts the fate of those cast off by God and left to die. The flood does not overwhelm and obliterate the living, as in scripture; instead it kindles fresh forms of life into being. In Iosilzon’s paintings, water envelops the world, but functions as an alchemical substance in which bodies metamorphose, become other to themselves, are newly bound to birds, insects, horses, fish, and each other. Iosilzon applies to her anthropoid creatures an array of transformations suggestive of heightened sensation. Limbs thicken or lengthen, and acquire fur, muscle, and a greater freedom of movement, while the bones underneath become weightless. These are bodies made to feel, float, embrace, dance, enjoy themselves.
Iosilzon’s scenes are flecked with dashes, dots, and crescents evocative of geological ruin, rubble, glimmering fragments, the detritus of a world blown apart. They might equally be marine flora and fauna dredged up by the deluge, scraps of sponge, anemone, and seaweed. Yet to see these specks of color as evidence only of destruction would be to misunderstand Iosilzon’s focus. Look at these discs again and note their quivering aliveness. For these globular forms also suggest microorganisms, the very beginnings of life on earth. Scattered over the surface of her canvases, this assortment of shapes is as evocative of microbes as they are seeds. They are harbingers of a radical renewal outside of the narrow judgements of the sacred.
The abiding feeling in Iosilzon’s paintings is joy. Bolstered by a constellation of artist ancestors, Iosilzon formulates her own Jewish folkloric universe in which the remorseless and rule-bound ideology of the Old Testament is broken open in the pursuit of pleasure. Through the cultivation of a set of recurring motifs, Iosilzon lays the foundations of this new world. Shofar horns, sounded in Jewish religious ceremonies to stir emotion – often, as in its use in Rosh Hashanah, as a portent of joy and hope – appear as headpieces or wigs, as though to ensure these creatures were never without the instruments with which to celebrate life.
All around these figures rise trees, multivalent symbols in Jewish culture that constitute one of the central metaphors in the Torah and the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, their status warranting their own holiday: Tu Bishvat, the new year for trees. Lobsters and frogs constitute playful allusions to Jewish dietary laws that forbid eating shellfish and amphibians. Closer to exotic flowers, lobster tails sprout out of the air with extraordinary patterns and shades, recasting the prohibition against their consumption as an issue not of obedience, but of beauty and autonomy. Not eating an orchid is a given, so why not protect these miraculous organisms? Many of Iosilzon’s repertoire of symbols refer to Judaism’s laws, ceremonies, and conventions, but any suggestion of servility or severity is expelled from paintings devoted to the joyful, humorous, communal aspects of its cultural and religious life.
Iosilzon places herself within a tradition in which artists have challenged an event known for carving up the world into a dramatic before and after. The paintings’ exact narrative content remains ambiguous, but of the several open-ended possibilities contained within these paintings, all embody a courageous hopefulness, a refusal of cruelty. In imagining another future for those deemed worthless, allowing them to flourish and adapt against the odds, Iosilzon transforms a fable about obedience and sin into a series of questions about a possible utopia.
Excerpts from the essay, “After the Flood: Yulia Iosilzon’s Subversions of Scripture” by Dr. Rebecca Birrell, Curator of 19th and 20th Century Paintings and Drawings, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, United Kingdom. Full text to be included in the forthcoming exhibition catalogue.
Yulia Iosilzon (b. 1992, Moscow) is a London-based artist who spent her formative years in Israel. Iosilzon holds a MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London (2019) and a BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Art, London (2017). Solo exhibitions include Heaven’s Chambers (2023), A Chorus of Beauty and Menace (2021), and Paradeisos (2019) and Carvalho Park, New York; Nocturnal (2022) with Foundry, Seoul; Amanita Muscaria (2022) with De Brock Gallery, Antwerp; Frogspawn (2022) at Sapling, London; Fanfarria (2021) at Huxley-Parlour, London; and The Big Fish! with Berntson Bhattacharjee, in collaboration with Sotheby’s Scandinavia, Stockholm. Iosilzon’s work has been shown in group exhibitions at Galerie Pangée, Montréal; Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing; De Brock Gallery, Knokke; Roman Road, London; Berntson Bhattacharjee Gallery, London; and SpaceK, Seoul; Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; among others. Institutional acquisitions include the Xiao Foundation Museum; X Museum; and Sixi Museum. She is the recipient of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries Prize and the Audrey Wykenham Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Hix Award. Iosilzon is represented by Carvalho Park.
Rebecca Birrell is the Curator of 19th and 20th Century Paintings and Drawings, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, United Kingdom. She studied at The University of Oxford before completing her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2021. She has occupied curatorial roles at The Charleston Trust, The Department of Prints and Drawings at The British Museum, The Jewish Museum, and the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust. In 2018, she undertook a fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art. Birrell's research draws on interdisciplinary approaches to visual culture, and centers around feminist and queer art histories. She is the author of This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century (2021). apling is pleased to present Frogspawn, a solo exhibition of new paintings and ceramics by Yulia Iosilzon. Responding to an original short story by the curator Sonja Teszler, the artist combines inspiration from this fresh literary source with her distinctive visual vocabulary to open a portal onto a subversive fantasy world. Sapling is treating the exhibition space as a marshland, inviting the artist to populate the gallery with paintings and ceramics of her creatures emerging from the water.