Leo Gallery Shanghai｜To the Things Themselves: From Myth to the Everyday

Leo Gallery is honored to present the year-end group exhibition To the Things Themselves：From Myth to the Everyday. The exhibition brings together a selection of works by artists Anna Nezhnaya, Brad Brown, Cécile Lempert, Chen Hongzhi, Giulio Frigo, Li Qunli, Mel Davis, Milène Sanchez, Sui Changjiang, Wang Hailin, Xu Dawei, Zhang Ning, Zhang Jian-Jun and Zhao Yiqian. Through their distinctive visual languages, each artist contributes a unique annotation to such poetics.

 

"To the Things Themselves" is the immanent revelation of matter within the realm of vision. Unburdened by narrative or the expectation of meaning, it directs perception toward pure intuition, crystallizing into a poetics of the "thing" itself. Here, the image primarily establishes itself as a "thing"-its material, form, texture, and structure constituting an autonomous existence independent of interpretation. This approach aligns with the philosophical proposition "To the Things Themselves," advanced by phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, which emphasizes the suspension of preconceived notions and a return to the original manner in which phenomena appear.

 

Through divergent creative paths, the artists in this exhibition collectively inscribe footnotes to a kind of "Poetics of Materiality." Their works traverse the spectrum from the mythic to the mundane, allowing matter to disclose itself: beyond the physical immediacy of oil's luster, neon's flicker, gold leaf's refraction, or leather's grain, there are also specific objects extracted from their contexts-the arrested posture of a theremin player, the congealed vitality of a doe, the hollowed form of a collar. Zhang Ning and Sui Changjiang liberate myth and the everyday from their habitual frames, presenting them as self-sufficient forms. Mel Davis and Wang Hailin render tranquil landscapes upon the canvas; Brad Brown constructs evolution through the interplay of brushstroke and trace; while Giulio Frigo, Anna Nezhnaya, and Zhao Yiqian strip disparate visual symbols of their accustomed associations, allowing them to manifest through their respective mediums.

 

The exhibition To the Things Themselves: From Myth to the Everyday seeks to recall a mode of "naïve looking." Within this space, the habitual inquiry into meaning is suspended, focusing the gaze upon the image itself so that things may be perceived before they are conceptualized. Viewers are invited to dwell upon the texture of materials, the contour of forms, and the resonant intervals within visual rhythm-thereby restoring those purely vivid sensory impressions that precede interpretation.