Immaterial Gelatine

Amélie McKee, Li Li Ren, Marieke Bernard-Berkel

12 April - 17 May 2025

The exhibition brings together three bodies of work that intentionally deviate from the traditional principle that form follows function, prioritising aesthetics, symbolism, or expression over strict functionality. McKee and Ren utilise ambiguity and the language of functional design, while Bernard-Berkel looks to overabundance of both colourways and material surface to exact a wrongness in the subject. Their practices encompass the reimagining of a past, pseudoscientific invention, the obfuscation of the traditional relationship between viewer and landscape painting, and the recontextualisation of components of machinery to suggest novel applications and divine inspirations. The artworks are replete with gestures towards ritualistic human behaviours, meaning-making and objects of spiritual use, human versus nonhuman impact and design, and obsession with wellbeing or conspiracy theories. These concepts, having guided these objects into existence, entangle in the space, allowing imagination to inhabit them and pointing to the complex dichotomy of objecthood.

Bernard-Berkel’s landscapes are the soiled object – pastoral scenes repeatedly adjusted with new layers of oil until they become muddied. They’re imbued with all that sits in between the human eye and the earth: including pain, love, the quotidien, and an overwhelming sense of the sublime. Their objecthood could be traced both to the Expressionists, and the artist’s interest in personal and collective wellbeing or, more importantly, our obsessive interest in commercially-driven wellbeing and perfectionism.