Mortal Thoughts: Nutsa Gogaladze, Ant Łakomsk, Travis MacDonald, Rico Weber

Bernheim Gallery is pleased to present Mortal Thoughts, a group show that brings together the practices of four artists: Nutsa Gogaladze, Ant Łakomsk, Travis MacDonald, and Rico Weber. The exhibition explores the lingering traces of absence and presence that remain as echoes of past experiences or as conjured fragments from the unknown. 

 

Working at the intersection of abstraction and figuration, the exhibition continuously hints at a fragment of memory that remains hidden, never fully unveiled. Through abstraction, obscured figures, and the interplay of light and shadow, this theme unfolds literally in the paintings of Łakomsk and MacDonald, where hazy figures emerge through painterly brushstrokes, as well as more conceptually through the works of Gogaladze and Weber, which explore how memory materialises within spatial constructs.

 

Self-taught artist Nutsa Gogaladze employs soft pastels coupled with a fluid, intuitive, yet gentle command of the figure that invokes warm memories of a charmed domestic life. Ant Łakomsk’s work suggests an interplay between void and form where figures simultaneously emerge and reappear on the canvas, while the painterliness of Travis MacDonald’s long, expressive strokes reminds us of the romantic and melancholic resonance of memory’s ghosts. The sculptural interventions found throughout Rico Weber’s oeuvre continue to create dynamic tensions between the seen and unseen, manifesting remnants of experience through the layering of contrasting images against abstract backgrounds.

 

Throughout the exhibition, fragmented memories unfold across media, space, and time as explorations of the ghostly remnants that inhabit our consciousness. Drawing from artistic predecessors such as Peter Doig, Odilon Redon, and Louise Nevelson, the works in Mortal Thoughts waver between recognition and obscurity, capturing the essence of what it means to carry the beauty and weight of our lived experiences.

 

Born 1998, Tbilisi, Georgia / Lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia

 

Nutsa Gogaladze is a self-taught artist who is based in Tbilisi. Gogaladze works mainly with soft pastel drawings and has recently started experimenting with oil painting. Her artistic practice involves a process of self-reflection and visualisation techniques, which create a fairytale-like manner of communication in her work. Gogaladze’s musical background also plays an important role in her creative process, which includes the selection of music and finding artwork title ideas from the tracks she discovers to listen to. 

 

Born 2001, Toruń, Poland / Lives and works in Warsaw, Poland 

 

Łakomsk is currently completing her MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, which she will complete in 2025. She creates paintings that narrate intuitive, mundane, and irrational emotions. Using ambiguous imagery, she often captures fleeting themes of memory and private mythology. She explores issues of identity and seeks to situate them within contemporary contexts. Despite the personal charge of her imagery, she avoids confessional language, aiming to create open narratives. Łakomsk combines the basic conventions of painting while exploring intermediate forms, allowing for transgressive interpretations of her chosen subject matter.

 

Born 1990, Bunnythorpe, New Zealand / Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

 

Travis MacDonald was born in 1990 in Bunnythorpe, New Zealand. He obtained his BFA from Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne in 2011. He currently lives and works in Berlin. MacDonald’s works often feature a subdued palette and links the mundane with the absurd, crafting a prosaic realism within painterly and material investigations. Subtle visual concepts allude to a larger, more profound context, while tender brushstrokes dissolve contrasts within the composition. The boundaries between figures and their surroundings grow fluid, creating a hazy, distorted, and melting sense of memory that resists rigid definition.

 

Born 1942, Hinwil, Switzerland / Died 2004, Bern, Switzerland

 

Originally from Zürich, Rico Weber trained as an interior decorator before traveling Europe. In 1966, he met Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, sparking a decades-long collaboration while developing his own practice. Fascinated by modern technology, he transformed industrial objects into sculptural assemblages, challenging photography’s flatness while preserving its expressive depth. Weber’s work fuses photography, installation, and sculpture into what he called “3D photographs.” Influenced by France’s Nouveaux Réalistes, he explored perception and illusion, creating molded relief-based works infused with Swiss rural and occult references.