Don’t know why I have to work
Don’t know why I can’t play
Turn me off turn me out
But don’t turn me away
Save me a place
I’ll come running if you love me today
Don’t know why I have to go
Don’t know why I can’t stay
Guess I want to be alone
And I guess I need to be amazed
Save me a place
I’ll come running if you love me today [2x]
The text, which is from the famous British-American rock band Fleetwood Mac's song (Save Me a Place), was presented by Sir Serpas as an official press release for her exhibition.
Serpas's solo exhibition - Monakhos (Monakhos in Greek, μοναχός - "solitary") opened on July 16 at the LC Quiesser Gallery and will be on view until September 4.
Monakhos is a stubborn meditation on artistic solitude and immobility provoked out of nowhere. The exhibition presents her rich oil paintings on unstretched canvas. They were created in the studio during self-imposed isolation while she listened to religious podcasts and audiobooks about Old World life and the Hebrew Bible. The motif of the faceless body, characteristic of the previous painting series, is preserved in her new works. Here, however, instead of intimate photos, she uses anonymous but public "before and after" sample images of plastic surgery patients found on the Internet.
Ser Serpas is a multimedia artist whose installations consist of sculpture, painting, drawing, and poetry. Interested in the physical matter of the body and its ephemeral concepts, she subjects them to sculptural changes and, on the contrary, introduces bodily sensuous signs into the sculpture. Serpas' practice transcends one medium or another, yet in each of them, the knowledge of physical structure, fragmentation, artificial arrangement, and the artist's autonomy in change is preserved. She constantly changes her place of residence - Zurich, Los Angeles, Tbilisi, and Paris - this chronic process of movement and travel inspired her to publish her poetry collection - "Guest House" and moreover, her large-scale sculptures use materials that she collects on the streets of different cities.
The fragility of the past moment and its unrepeatable character is revealed in the unrecognizable body parts depicted in the transitional phase of the sculpting process. The possibility of making a permanent change in the subject becomes clear at a specific intermediate moment of time, space and memory. Like her sculptures, where the "annexed" parts are never permanently fixed, the bodies represented in her paintings remain fluid and unstressed. The paintings, done in illuminated colors, awkwardly and sculpturally place softly modeled viscous bodies against an almost sterile background. The partially mixed, unidentified figures with indistinct features seem like heroic portraits, radiating stoic calmness.