THE THRESHOLD BECKONS

YULIA IOSILZON + NICOLA TURNER

OPENING FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 6—8PM

ON VIEW JANUARY 25 — MARCH 15, 2025

‘A limitless number of realities must exist,’ the protagonist of Ingmar Bergman’s 1978 film Autumn Sonata, Eva, insists, ‘not only the reality we can grasp with our blunt senses, but a tumult of realities that arch over and around, inside and outside.’ Confronted by the permanence of death, Eva eschews religious beliefs and arrives at a mystical theory of parallel worlds, and of a porous boundary between life and death. Bergman’s visionary thinking resonates with the existential concerns that unite new work by Iosilzon and Turner.

Bergman imagines different frames of reality interpenetrating one another, encircling our own reality’s central structure, creating unexpected meeting points where the thresholds between one world and another are thin. Bergman’s imagery could read as a description of one of Turner’s sculptures, tendrils comprised of horsehair and wool encased in netting that come together to entwine around metal supports. It could just as easily describe the atmosphere of fluid, looping motion filled with overlapping forms in Iosilzon’s paintings. Possibility of Living Three Lives at Once (2025) makes the work’s preoccupation with parallel universes explicit: it shows a figure meeting herself amongst a tangle of curves, dots and dashes — like there has been a snag in the space-time continuum, and the dense fabric that separates these women has briefly come undone. Turner and Iosilzon’s works are interested in liminality, in threshold states that offer the possibility of transformation, in ways of perceiving our surroundings through more esoteric understandings of being and non-being. These affinities are no coincidence. Iosilzon produced these paintings in response to Turner’s work, consciously creating an environment in which Turner’s creaturely sculptures could roam.

In Iosilzon’s paintings, a spectral woman’s face gazes impassively to her side. She appears to float, unburdened by the anchor of a body. Adjusting our eyes to the density of Iosilzon’s compositions, some limbs come into focus, the flesh with the consistency of glass. A certain angle of a line is a leg; in Purple Light (2025) a feathered protuberance is a hand with its fingers splayed, bracing against a surface. In each painting, female figures are enclosed by biomorphic shapes in organic tones, sometimes recognizably drawn from landscape painting. There are, for instance, in Fragility in Everything (2025), greens evocative of foliage and a powder blue that could be sky bleached by sunlight. Elsewhere, Iosilzon ranges widely across a dusky palette of purple, pink, amber, brown, and maroon. Turner’s monochromatic sculptures suggest voids, shadows, clouds, darkness itself, meteorological phenomena. Neither Iosilzon nor Turner make clear whether we are stood on solid ground or immersed in water or suspended in air. Instead, there’s a sense of being deep inside the distinctive gravity and materiality — the ‘tumult’ in Bergman’s words — of another world. It would be no surprise to see Turner’s The Gleaners (2024) or Chimera (2024) emerge out of Iosilzon’s paintings’ underside, to scuttle through on their arachnid wooden or metal legs. Whatever the substance is that they’re moving through, they seem adapted to it: these sculptures radiate the ingenuity of prehistoric microorganisms.

In Iosilzon’s paintings, there’s a sense of everything being mixed up — human, animal, plant and thing — of sprawl and expansiveness. Turner’s sculptures share this heterogeneity and wildness, this interest in unlikely couplings. Each combine hand-sewn natural fabrics with found objects. Offspring of dead matter and inert, repurposed material, Turner’s fibrous entities are animated by an eerie vitality. Largely this derives from the former lives of the materials Turner uses. Mattresses, where Turner salvages horsehair, bear witness to perhaps the most predictable aspect of our routines: they preserve dreams, archive desires. Turner’s wool is frequently sourced from flocks local to her in Bath in the United Kingdom. The fleece of a sheep was part of its body, a vital boundary between the animal and its world, and this intimate history might explain the heightened presence of Turner’s sculptures. In addition to this, their structures each carry histories of making and mending. In Chimera, a title that aptly summons the Greek fire-breathing monster composed of various animal parts, its legs are vintage wooden spindles, the tools used for spinning wool. The Annunciation (2024) balances on vintage screwdrivers. The Sower (2024), The Gleaners, and Unholy Trinity (2023) all make use of screwdrivers too, as well as hand drills, sheep sheers, setting tools and soldering irons. The material is often given to Turner by others. The stories these objects tell are unexpected, not Turner’s own, so their use involves a surrender to the memories and experiences of others. Nevertheless, something of Turner is absorbed by her medium given the long process through which she prepares it: breaking apart the horsehair, preparing the fleece, stuffing the netting, using a bradawl to manipulate the hair and stitching the mass into shapes. When not given to her directly, Turner reclaims what would otherwise merely be waste; the material appears to remember its brush with redundancy and revel in its new meaning.

Turner’s use of religious imagery is subtly referenced in Iosilzon’s colors, which are partly drawn from Renaissance devotional art. This correspondence highlights how the relation between Iosilzon and Turner’s work in this exhibition is not only philosophical, but spatial. In occupying the same space, expressing a shared constellation of ideas, they bring to mind the role of art historically in the Church, where altarpieces, stained glass and architectural features, such as fonts and naves together told the worshipers a story. But Iosilzon provides a secular metaphor for her interaction with Turner. Iosilzon describes the process of engaging with Turner’s sculptures as being akin to creating theatre, seeing her paintings as stage sets on which Turner’s protagonists act. Iosilzon recalls opening space in her paintings to clear the way for Turner’s actors, to appropriately spotlight them, to create room for dialogue. You can imagine how The Annunciation, with its connotation of divine instruction, might come alive in front of The Path (2024), with its title evocative of vocation, its androgynous figures suddenly acquiring an angelic aspect. Unholy Trinity has the look of a talisman or a weapon: could it be the center of some ritual overseen by the impish figures of Wizard Oaks (2025)? The Sower emits a similarly ominous affect. But the title promises fertility, and through it, Solar’s (2024) abundance of circular and oval shapes transform into seeds. If Chimera is a cipher of the monster of Greek myth, then could the billowing plumes of amber and orange in Escapism (2025) show the devastation reaped by its fiery breath?

Together, Iosilzon and Turner’s paintings and sculptures constitute a kind of gallery-based Gesamtkunstwerk, the term for a ‘total artwork’ in which all elements — music, voice, movement, and spectacle — come together to convey narrative. Indeed, a further element is still to come: Iosilzon and Turner were both aware their exhibition would eventually form the basis of a choreographed piece. The sensuous line of Iosilzon, in this light, maps out the movement of a dancer; Turner’s sculptures suddenly acquire a human posture. Iosilzon emphasizes her own practice’s role within this process through painting directly onto transparent fabric, as though she were making a stage backdrop. Iosilzon’s figures form a chorus around Turner’s creatures. When they open their mouths to speak, what stories will they tell?

Essay by Rebecca Birrell, Leverhulme Trust Fellow at The University of St Andrews and Research Associate at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK. Birrell is author of This Dark Country; Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century.

For press inquiries, please contact Elisa Smilovitz at elisa@elisasmilovitz.com

Yulia Iosilzon (b. 1992, Moscow) lives and works in London. She holds a MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London (2019) and a BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Art, London (2017). Solo exhibitions include Modus Operandi (2024) at Berntson Bhattacharjee, London; Heaven’s Chambers (2023), A Chorus of Beauty and Menace (2021), and Paradeisos (2019) at CARVALHO PARK, New York; Cool Summer (2024) and Amanita Muscaria (2022) with DeBrock Gallery, Knokke and Antwerp; New York; Nocturnal (2022) with Foundry, Seoul; Frogspawn (2022) at Sapling, London; Fanfarria (2021) at Huxley-Parlour, London; and The Big Fish! (2021) with Berntson Bhattacharjee in collaboration with Sotheby’s Scandinavia, Stockholm. Notable group exhibitions include those held at FRIEZE No. 9 Cork Street in London with CARVALHO PARK; SpaceK, Seoul; Galerie Pangée, Montréal; Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing; De Brock Gallery, Knokke; Berntson Bhattacharjee, London; Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; among others. Institutional acquisitions include the Roberts Institute of Art; Xiao Foundation Museum; X Museum; and Sixi Museum. Iosilzon is the recipient of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries Prize, the Audrey Wykenham Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Hix Award. She is featured in the Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting, Vol. III, 2025.

Nicola Turner (b. 1967, United Kingdom) is a sculptor and installation artist based in Bath, UK. She holds a MA in Fine Art from Bath Spa University, Bath (2019) and a BA in Theatre Design from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London (1989). With a background in set and costume design, Turner has over twenty years of international collaborations, designing productions for The Royal Opera House, London; San Francisco Opera; Scottish Ballet; Royal Shakespeare Company; Nashville Ballet; National Theatre; and Sydney Opera House, where she was the recipient of the Green Room Award and Helpmann Award. In 2024, her monumental, site-responsive sculpture, The Meddling Fiend, debuted in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Recent solo exhibitions include The Fabric of Undoing, CARVALHO PARK, New York; The Uninvited Guest from the Unremembered Past at the Tyntesfield National Trust House, North Somerset, UK (2024); and Myth and Miasma at the Skaftfell Centre for Visual Arts, Iceland (2022). Group exhibitions include those with Bomb Factory, London (2024); Somerset Rural Life Museum, Glastonbury, UK (2024); RWA Open, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, UK (2024); Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2024); Sir Hilliers Gardens, Romsey, UK (2024); and at Llantarnam Grange, Cwmbran, Wales (2024). Turner is a recipient of the RWA Academy Award, granted by the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, UK; the Developing your Creative Practice (DCYP) Grant; the Emerging Sculptors Development Award from Chapel Arts Studios (CAS); and Roche Court Educational Trust.