Cables of Cobwebs - Until 2 May 2026
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Bringing together a group of international artists whose work channels the spirit of the universe, this exhibition considers our enduring connection to the natural world. Across painting and sculpture, the artists gathered here turn their attention to the moon, earth, animals, water, plant life and symbolic forms drawn from nature, reflecting on the unseen forces that shape our lives. Magic, surrealism and the quiet intelligence of organic forms run through the works on view, inviting us to slow down and contemplate the threads that bind all living beings.
The exhibition takes its title from Yaya Yajie Liang's 2024 painting We are unwilling to spin out our thoughts into the phantasm of sleep, making cables of cobwebs are wilderness of handsome groves. Liang's practice is rooted in queer ecology, exploring the natural world as a space of expansive possibility where diversity of form is celebrated. Within ecosystems across the planet, variations of gender, sexuality and relationality flourish without judgement. For Liang, nature offers not only a model of this multiplicity but also a place of nourishment and healing. Her delicate watercolours on Chinese rice paper capture fleeting moments where organic forms appear to shift and dissolve. Leaves, tendrils and bodies swirl together, forming surreal constellations that evoke the magical essence of the natural world.
A similarly transformative relationship with nature appears in the paintings of Alexandria Smith. Smith’s figures are often portrayed in states of cleansing or rebirth, bathed in moonlight or emerging from waves. Water and moonlight become agents of change, washing away the burdens of the past and opening up space for new futures. Ornate frames extend the paintings’ narratives beyond their edges, inviting viewers to fully enter Smith’s imaginative world. Her work draws on the legacy of 20th-century female surrealists while looking forward, suggesting speculative possibilities for who we might become once we surrender to the rhythms of the cosmos.
Folklore and myth shape the dreamlike scenes created by Melissa Kime. Her paintings draw on the visual language of fairy tales, intertwining women, animals and seasonal landscapes. Throughout history, women have been imagined as healers, guardians of cycles and keepers of knowledge passed quietly between generations. Kime embraces these associations, depicting moments of transition that feel suspended between worlds. Figures appear alongside animals or within shifting environments that suggest the turning of seasons. In these spaces, the boundary between human and nature dissolves, allowing the viewer to linger in a threshold moment of transformation.
Anouk’s paintings also draw on a lineage of artists who have explored close relationships between humans and animals. Queer painters like Romaine Brooks, Lotta Laserstein and Renée Sintenis frequently included animals alongside their subjects, while the celebrated French painter Rosa Bonheur built her career painting animals with remarkable sensitivity. These histories resonate in Anouk’s practice. In the smaller shaped canvases presented here, animals appear as companions and counterparts, rendered in a restrained palette that allows bodies and the natural world to merge softly. Human figures remain deliberately neutral in form, creating a sense of openness that allows different viewers to see themselves in the scene. In these quiet encounters, human and animal meet on equal terms. The paintings evoke the atmosphere of ancient stories and fables, where animals often serve as guides, mirrors or spiritual companions.
Layla Andrews uses animal imagery to explore the complexities of human experience. A recurring crocodile head appears in her paintings, a haunting presence that blurs the line between instinct and consciousness. Raised in a matriarchal family and influenced by her mixed heritage, Andrews approaches storytelling as a layered, emotional process. Her paintings carry traces of memory, grief and resilience, exploring how personal stories intertwine with broader cultural narratives. In dialogue with Anouk’s work, Andrews reminds us that humans are also animals, driven by instincts that connect us deeply to the living world around us.
The landscape itself becomes a site of memory in KV Duong’s work. In Untitled (Enigma), no 3, he paints landscapes of his native Vietnam, terrains that carry the visible and invisible traces of war. His distinctive use of latex creates a surface that is both sensual and unsettling, calling to mind both skin and earth. For Duong, landscapes are never neutral; they absorb history, holding the imprint of violence, displacement and time. Yet in these works, the land also appears resilient – nature persists, continuing to grow and shift regardless of what has occurred upon it. In this sense, the landscape offers both testimony and possibility, carrying the scars of the past while remaining open to renewal.
Enrique Martínez Celaya’s work approaches nature through a poetic and philosophical lens. Integrating nuanced observations of fleeting experiences with enduring questions about memory, time and belonging, his paintings bring together carefully rendered figures, fragments of landscape and suggestive marks or lines of text. These elements often coexist in states of both completion and incompletion, creating images that feel caught between presence and memory. Drawing on myth, nature and personal history, Martínez Celaya’s work explores the fragile space between displacement and belonging.
Julie Hamisky’s sculptures bring the exhibition into three-dimensional form through delicate compositions of flowers and shells. Raised in the countryside south of Paris and later working within the studio of her grandmother, Claude Lalanne, Hamisky developed a fascination with preserving the fleeting beauty of organic matter. Using electrolysis, a process that transforms living plants into metal, she suspends fragile forms in time. Her compositions challenge balance, appearing almost impossible in their arrangement. They remind us that nature follows its own order, one that often exceeds human understanding.
Together these artists offer different pathways into the same fundamental realisation. The natural world is not separate from us but deeply intertwined with who we are. Landscapes hold memory, animals mirror our instincts and plants trace the rhythms of life itself. In turning towards these connections, the works in this exhibition ask us to imagine a future shaped not by domination of nature but by listening to its wisdom. Within that shift lies the possibility of healing, transformation and renewed belonging.
PATRICIA LOW VENEZIA
Palazzo Contarini Michiel, Dorsoduro 2793, 30123 Venezia, Italy