Em Kettner
Embedded within hand carved wooden frames, Em Kettner’s figurative drawings portray disabled bodies in a range of playful and empowering positions. Kettner controls the physical accessibility of her work, positioning her drawings at the eye level of those seated or in a wheelchair, whilst requiring others to crouch for a closer look. Like peep-holes, the carved frames serve as both a barrier and entry point.
Em Kettner (b. 1988, Philadelphia, USA) earned her BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: F2T Gallery, Milan, Italy (2025); Form & Concept, Santa Fe, NM (2025); Outer Space, Concord, NH (2024); François Ghebaly, New York (2024), Los Angeles (2022, 2021); Chapter, New York (2022); Specialist, Seattle (2022). Selected group exhibitions include: Et al. Gallery, San Francisco (2025); Pangée, Montreal (2025); Personal Space, Vallejo (2025); Chez Max et Dorothea, Los Angeles (2025); Laurel Gitlen, Brooklyn (2025); Secrist | Beach, Chicago (2025); NIAD Art Center, Richmond (2025); Friend of a Friend, Denver (2025); Pipeline, London (2024); Sacramento State University Gallery, Sacramento, California (2024); Winter Street Gallery, Maine (2024); Personal Space, California (2023); Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Maine (2023); Hales Gallery, New York (2023). Kettner’s work has been reviewed and published in ArtForum, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Contemporary Art Review LA (CARLA), HyperAllergic, Sixty Inches From Center, Institutional Model, and Fulcrum Arts: Sequencing. She is the recipient of the Wynn Newhouse Award, the MIUSA Women’s Institute on Leadership and Disability, and an SAIC Teaching Fellowship.
August Sundays 17/08
Em Kettner
Ryosuke Kumakura
Anna Ilsley
Matilda Sutton
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Em Kettner
The Watchman, 2024
Ink and graphite on paper in mahogany artist’s frame
25.5 x 33 x 4 cm
Ryosuke Kumakura
Ryosuke Kumakura’s paintings capture the essence and traces of use within everyday objects, possessions, and memorabilia, especially of those belonging to people in his own life. Influenced by the Japanese cultural religion of Shinto and its belief in animism - that everything from nature to inanimate objects hold their own spirit - Kumakura explores his work through a focused lens aimed at portraying the objects’ own character beyond that of their human owners. Through his acute attention to an object’s textural, tactile quality, Kumakura teases and blurs the boundaries between object and canvas, painting and viewer.
Ryosuke Kumakura (b. 1981, Niigata, Japan) lives and works in Rockport, Maine. He received his BFA from Tama Art University, Tokyo (2004), and later studied at the National Academy School of Fine Arts, New York (2011). Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Maine College of Art & Design, Portland (2024); Capsule Venice, Venice, Italy (2024); Capsule Shanghai, China (2023).. Selected group exhibitions include: St. Louis (2025); Pascal Hall, Rockport (2024); Capsule Venice, Venice, Italy (2024); and The Peninsula, Chicago (2023).
Ryosuke Kumakura
fur, 2024
Oil on canvas, wood stain on stretcher
25 x 20 cm
Ryosuke Kamakura
Towel, 2022
Oil on canvas, wood stain on stretcher
30.5 x 30.5 cm
Anna Ilsley
Inspired by mythologies and cross-cultural references, Anna Ilsley’s work explores the physical and emotional impacts of motherhood, and her visceral resistance to the cultural and political forces that shape women’s relationships with their bodies. Using the physical constraints of the canvas as a structure that both restricts and supports the figures it contains, Ilsley’s characters are in turn exuberantly fleshy, smothering, and monstrous.
Anna Ilsley (b. 1982, Hertfordshire, UK) lives and works in Suffolk. She completed her BA Hons in Fine Art Painting at Brighton University (2006) and her postgraduate studies at the Royal Drawing School, London (2010). Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Britten Pears Arts, Suffolk (2024) and Parsons X Payne, London (2023). Selected group shows include Asylum Studios, Suffolk (2024); White Conduit Projects, London (2022); Terrace Gallery, London (2022). Her work is held in collections at Soho House, Brighton; Beijing Capital Museum and the British School at Athens. In 2019 she received the Arts Council England Research and Development grant.
Anna Ilsley
Childcare 06, 2023
Ultramarine pigment
and gum arabic on
paper
44 x 36 cm
Anna Ilsley
Hoof, 2020
Oil on cradled panel
41 x 30 cm
Matilda Sutton
Rooted in archetypal and cultural narratives, personal experience, and embodied knowledge, Matilda Sutton’s work conjures beings that exist somewhere between human and animal. Working across painting, drawing, textile, and sculpture, she weaves narrative through image and object. In a material gesture toward dissolving fixed ways of seeing, Sutton paints her creatures on paper—figures often caught in gestures or gazes that emerge from probing the unstable edges of the body. Her work questions how we conceive of our wholeness and identity, unravelling binary systems and conceptual dualisms by re-imagining the parameters of ‘gender’ and ‘species’.
Matilda Sutton (b.1994) is based in Newcastle upon Tyne and graduated from Newcastle University in 2019. She participated in The NewBridge Project Collective Studio programme 2020-21. Solo exhibitions include: Pipeline, London, UK (2025); Pipeline, London, UK (2024); Vane, Gateshead, UK (2023) and Clifford Chance, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (2023). Vane presented a solo booth of Sutton's work at British Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2023). Selected group exhibitions include: Pipeline, London, UK (2025); Constantine Gallery, Middlesbrough Art Week, Middlesbrough, UK (2024); Newcastle Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK (2023); Vane, Gateshead, UK (2022 and 2021); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2022); Quench, Margate, UK (2022) and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2021).
Matilda Sutton
Scrappings, 2025
Acrylic and pencil on rag paper
22 x 30cm
Matilda Sutton
Peep, 2025
Acrylic and pencil on rag paper
22 x 30cm