We are proud to announce Julie Mia’s first solo show “Exvoto”. Her art is subtle, opaque, and at times even mysterious. She cautiously probes encounters with her own inner self and other people. Her paintings usually appear very delicate and watercolour-like despite the strong oil colours. The delicacy in the pictorial effect runs counter to the rough painting process, in which dried layers of paint are sanded off in order to be painted over and over again. Many of her works are created over a period of several years and are strongly characterised by translation processes: from analogue to digital, from object to canvas, from concrete to abstract. In doing so, they generally elude clear deciphering, while at the same time the works emanate a constructed symbolism. In addition to oil painting, she is increasingly focussing on sculptural themes, using sand printing as well as wax and paraffin. She studied at Chelsea College of Art & Design and the Camberwell College of Arts in London as well as the Villa Arson in Nice.

In the artists first solo exhibition, two newly created sculptures are shown in combination with a painting from 2017, which was completed in 2024. The two sculptures ‘lahja I‚ and ‘lahja II‚ (lahja: Finnish for gift) were created using a 3D sand printing process and represent a negative and a positive mould of an industrially manufactured knife. The negative mould is presented lying on a pallet, the positive mould hanging vertically with the tip pointing downwards. The latter also exists as a paraffin edition: ‘vanity‚ (Ed. of 3) 2023. The knife is one of the few objects that can be found in all human cultures worldwide. Over time, it also developed into an object of art, ritual and jewellery and even a means of payment. From the 18th century onwards, the knife became part of cutlery. Exploring ideas of permanence, transformation and process the artist‘s series of knives reveals this ambiguity within its profane character. Through the medium of wax or sand, the object becomes unusable – it can no longer be used for profane purposes, so to speak, and is reminiscent of the custom of a votive offering. The symbolic separation from one‘s own body, as a means of supplication, applies to the term ‘Exvoto‚. The exhibition title refers to the votive gift in allegorical form while also suggesting both the processual nature of the artist‘s work as well as a recognisable empowerment of signs. Reversal process creates a symbolic separation from the real object, resulting in a new imagined intimacy. Tangible, so to speak, in the face of the works as sensual (physical) energy. The exhibited painting ‚im moment, da die gewißheiten innehalten‘ was created over a period of seven years and is accompanied by a poem selected by Heiner Bastian wich was first published in October 2022 in his poetry collection ‘Der Gedanke der die Welt wiedergewinnt‚. Having a close dialogue with the german lyricist for years, the artist‘s series of paintings was titled after the first line of the poem dedicated to the painting. Both – poetry and painting – deal with imagination, myths, secrets and a subconscious ‚I‘. Contrary to the linguistically concrete, the paintings ultimately elude a figurative interpretation. Almost all of the artist‘s works are based on a figurative preliminary drawing of digital images of objects such as fruit, letters, digital codes or screen shots, which ‘disappear‚ in the
course of the process.

For further information please contact us directly.

accompanied by a poem by Heiner Bastian, curated by Aileen Treusch.

Preview: Saturday, March 16th | 2-7 pm*pls RSVP to mail@galerie-3ap.de