Dual-site exhibition: July 3rd to 5th at Tongzilin International Community Center, Chengdu China and July 23rd to 25th at Apsara Studio, London UK. Supported by Hands-on Curatorial Projects and Chengdu University College of Chinese & ASEAN Arts, with work made at NY20+ Artist Residency in Chengdu, China

Tongzilin International Community Center, Chengdu China July 3rd-5th 2026

Apsara Studios London UK July 23rd-25th 2026

Alex Close’s paintings unfold within the unstable terrain where labour, perception, abstraction, and the body converge. Drawing from personal experiences of self-monitoring, overextension, and the commodification of bodily and mental capacities, Close examines the contemporary condition in which the body is no longer merely lived through, but continuously optimised, disciplined, and negotiated within systems of precarity. Her works emerge from the pressures of inhabiting a culture that frames endurance as virtue and self-exploitation as aspiration – where productivity becomes inseparable from identity, and where the rhetoric of competition, resilience, and constant improvement transforms everyday life into a perpetual wager.

Underlying the exhibition is a sustained engagement with the body as both instrument and site of resistance. Close’s paintings repeatedly return to moments of tension: the pulling back of an arrow before release, the destabilised body searching for orientation, the instant before a leap or collapse. These are not depictions of movement in a literal sense, but conditions of suspended anticipation – states in which the body calibrates itself against invisible forces and uncertain outcomes. Labour appears here not only as physical exertion, but as psychic management: the continual disciplining of thought, gesture, attention, and emotion demanded by contemporary systems of work and self-governance.

This relationship between precarity and self-regulation echoes the writings of Isabell Lorey and Ana Vujanović, both of whom describe how contemporary power increasingly operates through internalised forms of control rather than overt coercion. In Close’s work, this governance manifests spatially and psychologically. The paintings hold a constant tension between containment and escape, between structure and instability, suggesting bodies and images caught within systems they simultaneously depend upon and attempt to exceed.

Movement itself becomes a central conceptual framework throughout the exhibition. Close is interested not simply in how bodies move, but in how movement is culturally conditioned: how speed, danger, balance, orientation, and spatial awareness are shaped by technological and social environments. Her works reflect contemporary perceptual states in which physical experience is continuously augmented by digital life – by aerial imaging, virtual navigation, screens, simulations, and networked systems that extend perception beyond the limits of the body. Drawing loosely from Karen Barad’s concept of “agential realism”, Close approaches perception as relational and co-produced: reality is not passively observed from a distance, but continuously formed through interaction, sensation, anticipation, and exchange.

This destabilisation of perspective resonates with the writings of Hito Steyerl, whose analyses of verticality, aerial vision, and digital image culture describe a world no longer organised through stable horizons or singular viewpoints. In Close’s paintings, orientation becomes provisional. Up and down dissolve, pictorial space twists and folds, and surfaces refuse fixed positions. The works frequently evoke the sensation of searching for equilibrium within unstable systems – as though the viewer, like the figures implied within the paintings, is perpetually attempting to locate a horizon that continues to shift.

Close’s approach to abstraction emerges directly from these perceptual conditions. Rather than treating abstraction as a reduction of detail or a withdrawal from reference, she approaches it as a process of accumulation, fragmentation, and transformation. Images, memories, bodily sensations, digital interfaces, gestures, and spatial systems dissolve into raw material that can be stretched, layered, rearranged, and reconstituted. Her paintings absorb the logic of the screen itself: semantic zooms, simultaneous scales, modular fragments, and overlapping fields of information coexist within the same visual plane. The viewer is invited to oscillate between intimate detail and panoramic perception, mirroring the contemporary experience of navigating image-heavy digital environments where multiple realities are encountered at once.

This logic extends to the physical construction of the works. Modular compositions, interrupted grids, and fractured picture planes reveal Close’s sustained interest in the frame as both structure and limitation. Grids and systems often present themselves as neutral, functional, or universal – much like modernist design languages or standardised digital interfaces – yet Close exposes the ideological assumptions embedded within these supposedly objective forms. Order becomes unstable; systems splinter and reorganise. Parts of the image threaten to escape the canvas entirely, while moments of openness and “air” interrupt dense accumulations of information. The paintings hover between utility and autonomy, between industrial structure and the desire to break free from imposed coordinates.

At the same time, Close insists on labour and material process in an era increasingly shaped by delegation and automation. Her practice asks what it means to continue making images by hand within a culture saturated by references, shortcuts, and computational production. Why preserve bodily labour when technology promises efficiency? What forms of knowledge remain embedded within repetition, touch, error, and duration? These questions are not approached nostalgically, but critically. Close acknowledges that access to slowness, physicality, and “offline” experience is itself unevenly distributed and increasingly privileged within contemporary life.

The paintings ultimately resist resolution. Like systems of speculation or gambling, they operate through tension, intuition, and incomplete control. Forms emerge only to destabilise; meaning accumulates only to fragment again. Understanding itself remains elusive – never fully capturable, always slipping beyond the frame. In this sense, Close’s work approaches abstraction not as escape from reality, but as a means of confronting the unstable conditions through which reality is currently experienced: fragmented, accelerated, overdetermined, and perpetually in motion.

Text by Letizia Agostini