Thomas Erben is very excited to present – as the last show of the season – photo works by gallery artist Yamini Nayar alongside paintings by recent Columbia graduate Sharon Yaoxi He, as well as videos and drawings by Vijay Masharani, having just concluded his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich.

The works by these three artists are abstract to the extent that ideas and historical precedents are explored in Nayar’s work, or consciousness itself in that of He and Masharani. The role of the autobiographical and the mediums employed are subsumed by a keen interest to push beyond the limits of existing vocabularies towards new possibilities of perception.

In her paintings, Sharon Yaoxi He introduces “irrationality” into the language of rationality. She uses geometric abstraction – which is generally characterized by flawless execution, surfaces defined by color and sharply defined lines – yet bypasses any reference to architectural or virtual spatiality. Taking issue with the mimetic aspect of painting, her work is guided by intuition and an aptitude for color, process and movement, suggesting visual attributes without neither narrative nor familiar illusionary effects, beholden only to her inner state of mind.

Yamini Nayar contributes a selection of photo works from Three Spaces for Time, her 2020 exhibition cut short by the pandemic. The works were created in keeping with her established practice, exploring the fields of postcolonial theory, modernism and its architecture, and space as repository of memory and of personal as well as archetypal psychological resonance. She does so through building sculptural arrangements in conversation with a recording, stationary camera. New in this series is her composite use of multiple exposures, taken from different phases of the same model, as well as of the early 20th century method of tri-color separation.

Video works and highly detailed pencil drawings complement each other in Vijay Masharani’s work. An intense psychic state is alluded to in the drawing Delirium backslide, which started with the unpredictability of smeared graphite powder and automatic marks. Comparably, Masharani shoots video at the intersection of his consciousness and the world, reacting to whatever comes into his path. In My Coarsening, his face, encased in a helmet, alternates with sequences of his constricted gaze as he paces from end to end of a New York subway platform, revealing quasi modernist visions of tracks, light and sound.

Accumulations emerge in a back-and-forth pacing within these individual practices and in relation to one another, expanding and refracting possibilities of the mind in relation to history, process and individual consciousness.