Intro : Curated by Graham Wilson
Swivel Gallery and MARC STRAUS announce their inaugural group exhibition, Intro, following the recent merger of the two programs. This first presentation under a unified platform introduces a shared curatorial direction grounded in material rigor, conceptual depth, and a commitment to artists whose practices challenge and expand contemporary discourse across the globe.
Bringing together works of Sonia Jia, Kiah Celeste, NH Depass, Edgar Orlaineta, Ioanna Limniou, Amy Bravo, Lucia Hierro, Marek Wolfryd, Alejandro García Contreras, and Frank Holliday, the exhibition unfolds as a collective proposition rather than a singular statement. Across painting, sculpture, installation, and interdisciplinary forms, the artists examine how meaning is constructed through systems of language, material transformation, embodied memory, and the visual codes that structure daily life.
Abstraction operates as both a formal strategy and a psychological terrain, whether through Jia’s sensorial surfaces that evoke vulnerability and intimacy, Celeste’s measured explorations of rhythm and duration, or Holliday and Limniou’s sustained engagement with gestural intensity and painterly history. Material becomes a carrier of cultural memory and speculative possibility in the sculptural and installation based practices of Depass, Orlaineta, and Bravo, where presence and absence, myth and corporeality, process and mutation remain in dynamic tension. Conceptual inquiry threads throughout the exhibition in works that interrogate classification, authorship, and institutional framing, particularly in the structurally precise and critically attuned approaches of Hierro and Wolfryd. García Contreras’s ceramic concoctions employ folklore meshed with contemporary iconography, foregrounding how identity, migration, and narrative circulate through form and image and across continents through various media exchanges.
Rather than isolating individual positions, the exhibition emphasizes resonance and friction across practices. Questions of translation, perception, and cultural inheritance surface repeatedly, revealing how artists navigate personal histories within broader social and aesthetic frameworks. The result is a layered conversation about how images hold emotion, how objects absorb systems of power and exchange, and how abstraction and figuration alike can function as sites of negotiation between interior experience and collective reality.
As the first exhibition following the merger, this presentation signals an expanded commitment to dialogue across generations, geographies, and methodologies. It affirms a shared belief that contemporary art can operate as a space where formal experimentation and critical reflection coexist, and where distinct artistic languages converge to articulate a complex and evolving cultural landscape.
