FROGSPAWN
10 June- 9 July 2022
Sapling 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.
Based in London, Iosilzon creates sites for escapism and introspection. Her instantly recognisable symbolic imagery finds roots in arts across time, from ancient mythology to contemporary cinema. In her paintings, the artist uses oil and silicone paints on stretched silk, expressing an abundant world where stories, symbols and characters subtly emerge, overlap, and interact. Rendered in the artist’s signature calligraphic brushstrokes, monumental flowers, plants, snakes and mischievous human faces float and shimmer above the translucent surface. Iosilzon’s ceramic practice includes standing sculptures and wall murals of distinct living organisms such as bees, mushrooms, and flowers.
Doubling as a curatorial text, Teszler’s story is a speculative reinterpretation of the classic fairy tale “The Marsh King’s Daughter” by Hans Christian Andersen. He tells the story of Helga, a woman who lives in two states: a bewitchingly beautiful but cruel person by day, and a monstrous frog-like hybrid by night, albeit with a kind character. In Teszler’s response, she learns to embrace her fluid, composite, non-categorical, and abject reality. The new story tracks Helga’s progress from a “split” state toward synthesis and final acceptance of her hybrid existence.
Taking this as a framework for reconciling Western philosophy’s tendency towards a dualistic worldview into a more holistic cosmology, the exhibition engages with the concept of the human and non-human evolving in contamination with one another. The project embraces all aspects of life including abject elements that traditionally provoke fear. Informed by a feminist perspective, artist and writer propose that we celebrate what may appear monstrous as a state of vibrant entanglement.