Thea Gvetadze, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Amol K. Patil, Mark von Schlegell, Minh Lan Tran, and Ang Ziqi Zhang

Press release

Jan Kaps is thrilled to announce the group exhibition '13 for Luck', which will pair work by Thea Gvetadze, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Amol K. Patil, Mark von Schlegell, Minh Lan Tran, and Ang Ziqi Zhang.

Thea Gvetadze (b. 1971, Riga, Latvia)
Thea Gvetadze deals with questions of identity construction and personal narratives. Ranging from room-sized installation to collage and small-sized drawings, Gvetadze creates enigmatic scenes that are loaded with psychological tension and symbolism. Transcending the mere individual, Gvetadze’s work speaks to universal concerns of visibility.
The exhibition features a selection of Gvetadze’s paintings. Depicting abstract figurative and symbolic sceneries, the works appear to reflect both stories from encounters in the artist’s life - be they nature, human stories, of her family or passers-by - as well as historical iconography.

Tanya Lukin Linklater (b. 1976, Kodiak, Alaska, USA)
Tanya Lukin Linklater explores Indigenous peoples’ lived experience, land-based knowledge, and structures of sustenance through an embodied practice including performance, dance, and choreography. Based on her own experience as a descendent of the Aluquii in south Alaska, Linklater investigates how indigenous knowledge and learning can function as a method of resistance to systematic dispossession by colonialism.
For her series of Hair Prints on view, Linklater coated her hair in natural pigments of crushed berries, transferring them to paper gesturally. The video This moment an endurance to the end forever, 2020, shows the artist performing alongside bentwood sculptural components in her own home and choreographed collaborations with dancers along the Salmon River, Ontario, as well as her own writing.

Amol K. Patil (b. 1987, Bombay, India)
The practice of Amol K. Patil centres around discourses on labour, value, and social conditions. Across works encompassing performance, video, installation, and sculpture, Patil raises questions about the morbid existential conditioning of humankind and its environment while advocating for worker’s rights.
Patil presents a series of sculptures made of fibre and found dust that extend from the artist’s long-term research project on Indian middle class life. Tracing his family's legacy of Dalit folk singers who worked for the Bombay Municipality as cleaners, a role reserved for India's former untouchables, Patil joined a group of sweepers in Bombay who clean and collect toxic dust in insalubrious working conditions. Reminiscent of found objects or leftovers from the street as well as body parts, the sculptures on view exhume the labour that escapes the collective gaze and to this day leads to exclusion and marginalisation.

Mark von Schlegell (b. 1967, New York, USA)
Mark von Schlegell’s research-based practice transcends the boundaries of genre, delving into literature, theory, criticism, performance, and painting. A writer of science fiction novels himself, Schlegell creates semi-literary art hybrids that draw on a wide range of inspirations, from major historical figures like Raymond Roussel to little-known characters like Eliza Poe.
The exhibition features two paintings depicting the famous writers of detective classics Agatha Christie and the mother of Edgar Allen Poe, Eliza Poe. Also on view is the piece 13 for Luck, an installation of 13 paperback novels featuring the author who is the creator of now legendary characters such as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Rare, aged, and visibly reread multiple times, the antiquarian books act as a new iteration of Schlegell's conceptual traveling bookstore REAL / BOOKS.

Minh Lan Tran (b. 1997, Hong Kong, HK)
Minh Lan Tran's practice builds on her own writing and identity-based research in calligraphy. Drawing on textual elements, Tran creates works on canvas that blend writing and paint in an iterative process of reflection and integration. Skin-like and multi-layered, Tran’s compositions evolve, respond, and change through her own bodily actions. Coming from choreography and performance, she treats the canvas as a field of tensions where corporeality forms and dissolves in deep incisions.

Ang Ziqi Zhang (b. 1994, Brampton, Canada)
Ang Ziqi Zhang investigates the transmission of meaning in the realms of late capitalism. Drawing on textual elements, signs, and their own writing, Zhang explores semiotics as a mediating system in the production of desire and affect in consumer societies.
In their paintings on display, Zhang has transformed visual traces drawn from public spaces such as symbols, traffic signage, markings, and architectural structures into images that oscillate between abstraction and subtle figuration. In thin, slowly built-up, ostensibly transparent layers of paint, Zhang reworks these elements almost to the point of obliteration.