Statement:

Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery is delighted to present ‘All About Eve’, a group exhibition co-curated by Soheila Sokhanvari and Kristin Hjellegjerde.

The show’s title is taken from the 1950 film of the same name, which follows the tale of Margo Channing, an aging Broadway star, whose career is threatened by the younger, more ambitious Eve.///

Drawing on the film’s complex dynamics of rivalry, power, and vulnerability, the exhibition traces the history of patriarchy and misogyny, right back to the Biblical story of creation, exploring everything from religious rituals and cosmology to contemporary forms of gender-based inequality.

Iraqi artist Afifa Aleiby’s emotionally-layered works weave together personal experiences with collective histories and mythologies, shedding light on the complex dynamics of love and loss.

In Daphne and Apollo, the tragic transformation of Daphne mirrors the loss of female agency within the myth, while the solitary figure in Eternal Echo evokes the haunting weight of forgotten histories—reflecting how women’s experiences, though often silenced, continue to resonate and shape their identities in ways both visible and unseen.

Anne Zanele Mutema’s textile installation similarly acts as a ‘memory map,’ tracing the emotional imprints of historical narratives within the female form. The varying degrees of clarity and fading lines ask how much power we truly have over the stories that surround us, especially those imposed by external forces.

Italian artist Carolina Mazzolari also reflects on the ways in which narratives are filtered through and written into the body. Figure V, part of her ongoing Archetypes series, takes a shape reminiscent of an embalmed body, inscribed with symbols or a coded system that looks at once strikingly contemporary and ancient.

As such, she calls our attention to the enduring ways in which women’s bodies have been used as vessels for societal narratives. Sutapa Biswas, meanwhile, presents an extraordinarily visceral painting inspired by her personal experiences of childbirth and of becoming a mother.

In this work, mother and baby are depicted as an interconnected, hybrid figure emerging from urgent, fluid brushstrokes, while the smoky wings billowing out of the woman’s side are suggestive of her own transformation and rebirth.

In a continuation of his memory vessels series, Bouke de Vries presents a pair of ewers connected by a gold chain. Drawing inspiration from the female characters in All About Eve, the vessels symbolise the competing yet inextricable relationship between Margot and Eve.

The glass ewer, representing Margot, is ostensibly the more fragile of the two and contains broken fragments, while the left-hand vessel, representing Eve, appears whole but has been repaired using the Kintsugi technique, transforming the brokenness into a symbol of strength and beauty.

These vessels powerfully reflect on the ways women are often pitted against one another, yet are bound by shared experiences of vulnerability, resilience and reinvention.

Other artists in the show look to the natural world – ‘Mother Earth’ – as a way of exploring origins and identity.

London-based artist Sophy Rickett has created new works that pair repurposed imagery from her project The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows, which explores the life and work of Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn, a little-known 19th-century Welsh artist and astronomer, with fragments from a long-form text that traces the course of the river Teign in Devon.

The words appear hovering, ghost-like, over the image, meditating on the movement of time and the idea of circularity as she imagines her mother’s ashes returning to the earth.

Meanwhile, two paintings from Iranian artist Meghdad Lorpour’s ‘Nashi Wind’ series depict the foaming spray of the sea as it crashes into the coastline along Persian Gulf, evoking both the physical reshaping of land and the emotional transformations tied to personal and collective loss.

The paintings are titled after a Hormozgan-province winter wind, which, although invisible, becomes symbolic of the subtle but profound changes in both the natural world and human experience.

A still life painting by Gordon Cheung titled Legends of the Lake (Nanjing) also considers the consequences of human action. Through a distorted image of a Chinese Imperial scroll painting that forms the background of the work, Cheung reflects on the theft of cultural heritage and the erasure of history.

Meanwhile, in the foreground, wilting flowers and stock listings comment on the environmental and social toll of humanity’s insatiable pursuit of wealth and knowledge, mirroring the ways women are often consumed and erased by forces of power and ownership.

In this way, the exhibition not only reflects on past oppressions but also celebrates the strength that arises from them, offering renewed visions of empowerment, agency and creative expression.