Drawn from memory: Matthew Eguavoen, Jammie Holmes, Jerrell Gibbs, Shaina McCoy

At times melancholy and dreamy, with a gaze drifting out the pictorial space and in three-quarter profile, yet at other times depicted with a determined expression and almost direct eye contact, Matthew Eguavoen's portraits are characterized by expressiveness and emotion. Large areas of intense colors shape the reduced form of the background, against which it is eye-catching shapes of various figures, gestures of hands and fingers, and facial expressions that paint an aesthetic picture, allowing us to speculate on the state of mind of those portrayed. With subtle intuition, the artist brings nuances of emotional expression to the canvas and addresses socially and politically relevant themes such as gender inequality, physical health, or the consequences of structural inequality. In addition to communicating through his sensitive visual language, Eguavoen continues these debates within the titles of his works, referring to experiences and living conditions in Nigeria, coined by precarity with titles such as ‘The life I was promised back home isn't what I met here’ (2024) or ‘If i see work i go do’ (2024).

Self-taught painter Jammie Holmes reckons with the social, cultural, and political realities of Black life in the US-American South in his practice. His works draw from a visual repertoire of personal and shared memories as well as his own experiences, often shifting between realism and surrealism, and between portraiture and symbolism. For example, this sentiment is poignantly reflected in the work ‘The Gambler‘ (2024). On a table where a grey-haired man is seated, gazing solemnly to the right, stands a proudly upright rooster. While both their heads are turned towards the center, it remains unclear whether they can see each other, or even if they occupy the same reality. At the foreground of the image, the rooster seems to precede the human, begging the question: is the placement more symbolic than what is actually portrayed? Is it a play on luck? Is the gambler gambling the rooster, is he betting him, or perhaps, is the animal the opponent? Or does Holmes invoke the rooster’s classical Greek connotations as a symbol of alertness, triumph in battle, and male vitality? On this potential theme of vitality, parallels are quickly revealed when looking at Holmes’ second untitled work. With a color palette reduced to shades of brown, black, and white, and being set in a less realistic environment, a young man’s head emerges from a white collar reminiscent of a flower. The surrounding space is filled with a tangled plant structure composed of stems, leaves, and both closed and open lily blossoms. Collar and petals appear strikingly similar, blurring the boundaries of clear attribution. Does the young man's head rise from the lily because its petals closely resembles the shape of an elaborate collar? Or is Holmes, through his choice of flower, referencing the lily’s symbolic connotation of purity, beauty, and perfection? Additionally, through the juxtaposition of his two works, is Holmes pointing to a contrast between youth and age, between freedom and burden?

As if traveling backward through the life of the portrayed, the dancer in Jerrell Gibbs’ ’With Grace’ (2025) appears even younger than Holmes’ youthful character. Light falls on her face and raised hands, capturing the movement of the young ballerina, whose body Gibbs almost entirely merges with the dark background through his use of color. She seems absorbed in her dance, unaware of being observed, and the painted moment feels like a spontaneous snapshot, a captured instant suspended between the present and a memory. This fusion of fleeting gesture and atmospheric depth runs through Gibbs’ broader body of work. Often starting from with private archival photographs, he develops autobiographically charged scenes that explore themes such as Black masculinity, fatherhood, care, belonging, and everyday intimacy while questioning and reimagining stereotypical representations.

Through rich layers of paint and intentional brushwork, Shaina McCoy gives her portrait subjects a strong sense of personality and expression – even without clearly defined facial features. Rendered in larger-than-life formats and set against simple, minimalistic backgrounds, these faceless figures emerge from the artist’s visual memory and personal photo archive just as much as they offer space for the viewers’ own memories and projections. These pictures depict intimate moments of family life, capture aspects of the artist’s own upbringing or that of people close to her, and reflect both personal experiences and collective ones, such as school picture day or a visit to a photo studio to get your picture taken. Every artistic choice of ‘Jojo in his Yankees’ (2024) evokes such a situation: the chair the toddler is seated on, the backrest he clutches, the unmistakable backdrop with its softly blended patches of color, and the slightly tilted, gently turned head. McCoy reconstructs fragments of her personal past while inviting viewers to locate themselves within these familiar scenes, blurring the line between personal memory and collective experience.

We are delighted to present these diverse positions, united by their continuous reference to memory, in our new Berlin gallery space at Karl-Marx-Allee 82, creating a ground on which new memories can be made, take root, and flourish.