Ted Pim: Never Odd or Even

Ted Pim: Never Odd or Even
April 11, 2024 — May 18, 2024
Almine Rech London
Grosvenor Hill
Broadbent House
London
W1K 3JH

Almine Rech London is pleased to present Never Odd or Even, Ted Pim’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from April 11 to May 18, 2024.

Mirrors can be portals to other realms. In Irish folk tradition, reflective surfaces are covered at a wake for fear that the soul of the deceased might otherwise slip through. In ‘Snow White,’ it is before her own reflection in a glass chalice that the queen transforms into a witch. Such surfaces have long appeared in mythology and throughout art history as points of revelation and metamorphosis. In Never Odd or Even, Ted Pim’s paintings map out the anatomy of transformation using mirror image as a central motif.

At the heart of the exhibition is the idea that transformation is not something that requires new material, but instead is an altering of what we already have. To this end, Pim segments and repurposes Old Masters paintings. Some are abstracted via a duplication that sees identical forms mirrored as they merge or collide on either side of a central axis.

These images are formed from fragments of Renaissance and Baroque paintings paired with imagery from fashion magazines and Irish mythology. Their symmetry echoes the cyclical structure of existence, hinting at an underlying message of the exhibition that as much as we transform history, always repeats.

These paintings can be read as documenting a splitting of the self, the moment of transformation where both our past and present states coexist. In these snapshots of an in-between realm, kaleidoscopic arches appear that join the two sides of a mirror. A woman’s face, doubled and inverted, gives birth to architectural form as the contours of her brows meet and curve into archways.

In another, the wings of twin swans collect into a feathered crest, their necks crooking back to meet the other’s horrified gaze. Here, as history repeats, it looks upon its own image with dismay. Swans appear as a reference to the Irish myth ‘The Children of Lir,’ in which four children are transformed into the creatures, able to take on human forms only under the moonlight. References to this myth appear throughout the exhibition as swan-like figures extend into or out of swan-hood. The direction is unclear.

The forms in these paintings appear at once pulled into and expelled from the central reflective axis. This ambiguity of movement leaves Pim’s images endlessly oscillating between expansion and contraction such that the walls of the gallery appear to breathe with life.

In other works we find Renaissance figures tucked under fauna, visible by the light of a full moon, a reference to the Irish tradition of calling forth transformation with a new moon cycle. As Pim layers imagery from the covers of high-fashion magazines and opulent masterpieces, his works inevitably develop a familiar beauty. His paintings are intricate, with an emphasis on the detail, texture, and tangibility of the objects portrayed. In the artist’s source paintings, these techniques were largely used to emphasize and celebrate wealth and to intertwine nobility with the virtues of the
gods.

Ted Pim: Never Odd or Even opens on the April 11, 2024 until May 18, 2024 at Almine Rech London

©2024 Almine Rech