Eva Dixon: SCORE!

Eva Dixon: SCORE!
14th August 2025 – 14th September, 2025
Split Riviera
(at the back of Grow Hackney)
Hackney Wick
E15 2SJ

A bold debut where wrestlers, footballers, and sex workers take center stage — all on collectible cards.

Exhibition text written by Anna Moss for Split Riviera

Eva Dixon’s inaugural solo exhibition, SCORE! features a dynamic cast. The Ipswich football team, WWF wrestlers, sex workers, a lone diver. Appearing on collectible cards sourced by the artist, these characters appear in control.

Though the cards name real individuals, they often read as archetypal, exaggerated ideals of hyper masculinity or hyper femininity. Dixon has a deft way of framing paradoxes, literally and metaphorically. Always playful, she highlights that the more something epitomises heterosexuality, the more it becomes camp. Jock-themed porn, fetishwear and parties are examples of how gay culture appropriates sport. In the artist’s own football work, the Ipswich team recede and emerge from a surface of glitter-covered construction mesh. The treasured cards have been folded or clipped, sometimes rendering the men anonymous bodies: it’s material that’s Dixon’s star player. 

In the 1960s, art historian and critic Leo Steinberg wrote of what he saw as  a critical shift in painting, a ‘tilt’ in orientation. For Steinberg, prior painting had been ‘vertical’, meaning it was oriented towards a viewer standing upright.

However abstract the painting, compositions were still directed head to foot. Steinberg believed artists such as Robert Rauschenberg had moved toward a different way of painting altogether — a ‘horizontal flatbed’. Horizontal painting resembles surfaces: ‘tabletops, studio floors.. Bulletin boards.. any receptor surface on which data is entered’. These kinds of works don’t evoke depictions of the real world, but our very processes of receiving information. 

Dixon’s practice, like Rauschenberg, also escapes the confines of a two-dimensional picture plane, with works becoming a ‘receptor’. Drawing upon her family history in trade, her surfaces recall sites of manual labour, converging it with the visual languages of sex, gender and fan culture.

Images or logos are applied with force; chained, clamped and penetrating the structure of each work. Dixon’s assemblages instil weight and dimension to the flat picture: she makes ‘things’ — picture or material — look corporeal. In Knock Out, the veins of plastic wrap enclose the flexed muscles of wrestlers. Stretched over, held taut and exposing their frames, Dixon’s works often materialise desire. Desire as a state of suspension. A subtle, unresolved tension of fabric that rivals the immediacy of the erotic image.

Eva Dixon: SCORE! opens on the 14th of August 2025 until the 14th of September, 2025 at Split Riviera

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©2025 Eva Dixon, Anna Moss