Statement:

Carl Kostyál is delighted to present ‘The Afterlife of Forms’, the inaugural exhibition at The Pavilion in St. Moritz, on view from 29th January – 1st March. 

The group exhibition brings together works by Camilla Engström, Hilma af Klint, Arghavan Khosravi, Austin Lee and Peter Schuyff, among others.

‘The Afterlife of Forms’ explores how visual forms persist, reappear and shift across time, taking on new meanings through context, placement and comparison. 

The exhibition unfolds through rotating hangs organised by proximity rather than chronology, encouraging works to be read through relationship rather than sequence. ///

These encounters move between affinity and contrast, pairing moments of visual harmony with abrupt juxtapositions that prompt unexpected readings.

Artists from different cultural and geographic contexts are placed in dialogue, allowing visual languages from East and West to sit alongside one another without resolution. 

In one grouping, Li Shurui’s ‘Contract / Expand’, 2020, is shown beside Banks Violette’s ‘Untitled Flag’, 2025. 

Shurui’s acrylic work, derived from photographs of LED light and recreated through airbrush, fractures colour and space through optical instability. 

Opposite it, Violette’s graphite drawing of an inverted American flag offers a stark image of national distress. Seen together, the works suggest how abstraction and visual disruption often emerge at moments of political unease, when familiar images no longer feel sufficient.

A different register of contrast appears in the pairing of Hilma af Klint’s ‘Karlbergs slott’, 1901, with Feng Zhengjie’s ‘Amour Papillon’, 2003. 

Af Klint’s small, quietly observed landscape carries an inward, contemplative quality, likely made for private reflection rather than display. 

Feng’s work, by contrast, depicts two women, likely courtesans, seated on a rock, their poses languid and sexually charged: one nude, the other wrapped in a yellow satin coat over traditional dress. 

Their ambiguous setting, hovering between nature and stage and their poised glances imply performance and spectatorship. 

Read together, the works shift attention from subject matter to the conditions under which images are produced and viewed.

Questions of perception and mediation continue in another room, where Peter Schuyff’s large-scale ‘Untitled’, 1986, faces Austin Lee’s ‘Bear’, 2018, and is shown near Hor Kwok Kin’s photographic print ‘Tucking In’, c.1960. 

Schuyff’s painting draws on late-twentieth-century abstraction shaped by repetition, optical pattern and mechanical reproduction. 

Lee’s work, rooted in post-internet culture, reflects digital modelling, virtual space and screen-based imagery. 

Seen alongside photography, the grouping highlights how changing technologies, from analogue processes to immersive digital environments, continue to shape how form is generated and perceived.

Across its iterations, ‘The Afterlife of Forms’ suggests that artworks remain active: altered by context, reshaped through comparison, and continually redefined through encounter.

– Gabriel Max Shelsky