Twilight Contemporary is excited to announce Fire, a group show including Ellie Walker, Bethany Holmes, Mengmeng Zhang, Rosalind Howdle, Angélique Nagovskaya and Joy Yamusangie.
From the very first spark, fire has held humanity in enduring fascination. As the point of origin for human civilisation, fire illuminated the earliest acts of cooking, metallurgy, and ritual. We may all have imagined that distant, mythic night where people gathered around the flame, as primitive language gradually took shape in the interweaving of light and heat. Before it cools, narrative, collective memory, and emotional bonds came into being for the first time.
Heraclitus regarded fire as the primordial element through which all things come into being and pass away. Yet for him, fire was not merely physical combustion, but a philosophical figure for becoming - a continuous process of consumption, transformation, and change. The nature of fire resonates with his fundamental proposition, panta rhei (“all things flow”): existence is not a fixed entity, but an unfolding process, to be understood through movement rather than stasis. This notion finds echoes in Eastern thought as well. Daoism emphasises the fluidity and duality of all things, where mutual generation and restraint (xiang sheng xiang ke) form the underlying principle of the world’s operation.
Destruction and creation are not opposites, but different phases of the same process - just as fire destroys material even as it tempers and transforms it. The works in this exhibition are interwoven with fire as a compelling element, exploring from multiple perspectives the fluidity of existence and the possibilities of transformation. Fire is, by nature, visible yet untouchable - an immaterial presence. When introduced into the two- dimensional space of painting, it is released from its physical properties and becomes instead a field of imagination and perception. Within this space, fire is no longer bound by the logic of reality, but assumes visual forms that are open, fluid, and at times playfully unconstrained.
Words by Odile Zhao
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