Shifting Focus
Female Painters & Sculptors 2025
Pontone Gallery, London
7 March - 5 April 2025
Objectify/Personify, 2023
Acrylic on board, 40 × 31 cm (15.6 × 12.2 in)
Courtesy of the artist and Pontone Gallery, London
Featuring works by Gretchen Andrew (b. 1988, US), Yuki Aruga (b. 1985, UK), Cha Jongrye (b. 1968, South Korea), Madeleine Gross (b. 1993, US), Heather Horton (b. 1974, Canada), Sarah Muirhead (b. 1987, Scotland), Park Jieun (b. 1987, South Korea), Reisha Perlmutter (b. 1990, US)
Pontone Gallery presents Shifting Focus: Female Painters & Sculptors 2025, a wide-ranging exhibition featuring works by a selection of female gallery artists who each explore a fluid and nuanced relationship with their subject matter and modes of expression. These artists engage with conventions and anticipated outcomes, subverting, modifying, and adapting processes to create work that transcends the literal and descriptive.
The exhibition showcases painting, sculpture, and digital media, with artists Yuki Aruga, Heather Horton, Sarah Muirhead, and Reisha Perlmutter interrogating their representational abilities to make transformative studies of the natural and human form. Park Jieun reveals hidden worlds within her graphic compositions, while Gretchen Andrew and Madeleine Gross explore the ironic collisions of media-generated imagery and the physicality of paint. Sculptor Cha Jongrye delves into the allusive properties of form and material.
Curated to highlight the wide-ranging and exciting work produced by women artists associated with Pontone Gallery, Shifting Focus: Female Painters & Sculptors 2025 coincides with International Women’s Day on March 8, and will run alongside its attendance at Palm Beach Modern & Contemporary 2025.
Exhibiting Artists
Miss India, 2024
Oil on canvas, 122 × 51 cm (48 × 20.1 in)
Courtesy of the artist and Pontone Gallery, London
Gretchen Andrew
American, b. 1988
Gretchen Andrew, an American-born artist, combines the digital and AI-generated with the physical to examine the intersection of algorithms and aspirational reality. She takes computer-generated oil paintings of female subjects and manipulates them with additions generated by FaceTuning apps, set forth on the canvas by a separate robot programmed specifically for the task. The result is a portrait of tension between "who you are and who the algorithms say you should be."
Foot Portrait 1, 2025
Acrylic on wood panel, 41 × 30 cm (16.1 × 11.8 in)
Courtesy of the artist and Pontone Gallery, London
Sarah Muirhead
Scottish, b. 1987
Scottish painter Sarah Muirhead creates striking depictions of the decorated human body. Her cropped, dynamic compositions reveal subjects adorned with elaborate tattoos, each embellishment adding an additional layer of meaning and narrative. Through a highly skilled and technically accomplished approach, she presents sensuous representations of the human form.
South of France Sunbathers #2, 2025
Acrylic paint on original photography
71.1 × 106.7 cm (28 × 42 in)
Courtesy of the artist and Pontone Gallery, London
Madeleine Gross
American, b. 1993
Madeleine Gross, an American artist, makes painterly interventions on photographs. Idyllic, sun-drenched landscapes are amended with vigorously worked, painted images of interacting figures. Two worlds coexist—one of coolly observed critical distance and another of heartfelt, willful engagement. The latter, a passionate female principle, binds together these disparate images of temporal paradise and human connection.
The Moon at Dawn, 2023
Oil on canvas, 140 × 110 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Pontone Gallery, London
Yuki Aruga
British-Japanese, b. 1985
British artist Yuki Aruga creates large-scale oil paintings of floral motifs that unfurl in a virtuoso display of painterly skill. Her forensic depictions of natural forms are imbued with expressive intensity, transcending the everyday. Like their classical antecedents, her dramatic and sensuous compositions evoke themes of fecund growth and romantic decay.
In Solitude, 2024
Oil on canvas, 55.9 × 76.2 cm (22 × 30 in)
Courtesy of the artist and Pontone Gallery, London
Reisha Perlmutter
American, b. 1990
American artist Reisha Perlmutter offers ethereal painted images of women floating in water, as if suspended in an amniotic medium, caught between states of contemplation and detachment. Her precise, observation-based technique results in luminous works that suggest a spiritual dimension inhabited by her female subjects.
Transome, 2025
Oil on panel, 40.6 × 40.6 cm (16 × 16 in)
Courtesy of the artist and Pontone Gallery, London.
Heather Horton
Canadian, b. 1974
Canadian painter Heather Horton observes her subjects through thick, stained, and undulating glass. The female head appears fragmented, occluded, and fugitive, glistening behind a veil of refractions and distortions. Identity is approached through an intervening, modulating medium that is hard to penetrate, evoking themes of perception and self-awareness.
A Little Talk – Hong Kong, 2024
Chinese ink, acrylic, and gold leaf on Korean paper
60.6 × 60.6 cm (23.9 × 23.9 in)
Courtesy of the artist and Pontone Gallery, London
Park Jieun
South-Korean, b. 1987
Korean artist Park Jieun works on paper using traditional ink-laden brushwork. From a distance, her paintings appear as abstract exercises in expressive, calligraphic handling. On closer inspection, tiny urban landscapes emerge—hidden within the gestural marks, the contemporary is contained within the traditional.
Wood (White birch plywood), 2024
Sibatool, 70 × 70 × 12 cm (27.5 x 27.5 x 4.5 in)
Courtesy of the artist and Pontone Gallery, London.
Cha Jongrye
South-Korean, b. 1968
Cha Jongrye, a Korean sculptor, bends and moulds birch plywood into three-dimensional Platonic forms, exploring and multiplying folds and curves. The resulting sculptures evoke a multitude of natural structures, from the contours of the earth to the cellular formations of microscopic life.
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74 Newman Street, London, W1T 3DB
