with yourself

Melissa Brown, Andrea Joyce Heimer, Volker Hüller, Olivia Jia, Marin Majić, and Johanna Seidel

April 12 - July 6, 2024

Gaa Projects Cologne

Gaa Gallery is pleased to present with yourself, a group exhibition featuring works by Melissa Brown, Andrea Joyce Heimer, Volker Hüller, Olivia Jia, Marin Majić, and Johanna Seidel. The exhibition brings together these artists whose observational and imaginative approaches to painting and material examine a breadth of topics relating to everyday narratives and the dimensionality of daily experience. From revealing the otherworldliness of the ordinary to multifaceted qualities of loneliness, belonging, and memory, the works in with yourself engage in a conversation about narrative, selfhood, and representation.

The works in the exhibition depict the times in which we are alone. The moments of internal dialog. The conversations we have with ourselves. The rehashing of an exchange. The state of lying down, looking up. Being there and not there at the same time. The times we are alone in transit, traveling from one place to another. They are images of moments of stillness, both eery and calming. The moments of daydreaming, brainstorming, and playing out different scenarios and fantasies. The moments we are by ourselves and somehow still connected to other people and places. The belonging of a loved one, the memory we have of something, and the things we see when we look at a picture. They are depictions of the flickering thresholds that separate virtual, mental, and physical spaces. The spaces between the physical moments of togetherness and belonging with others and the belonging we have alone, within ourselves.

Within these works, there is a sense of solitude. Sometimes, this is in the literal absence of people, their presence felt through objects and environments portrayed in varying degrees of representation and abstraction. In instances of the presence of the human figure, the subject is often looking away. They are alone amongst interior and exterior landscapes or are only seen through another interface, a reflection, or a technological device. There is a sense of the perspective of an outsider looking in, putting together the pieces of the story. They are worlds of interior spaces—dreamscapes, the stories hidden in the belongings of others, pictures stored on the cloud, the dull pangs and real threat of existential dread, the states between waking and sleeping, experience and recollection.

with yourself opens on Saturday, April 20, with a reception from 2 - 6 pm at Gaa Projects, Antwerpener Str. 4, 50672 Köln, Germany, and will be on view through July, 6.