10 Chancery Lane Gallery is excited to present the first Hong Kong solo exhibition of female Indian artist Sonia Mehra Chawla, in which she will exhibit a new series of paintings and videos that explores the passage of nature’s cycle and the temporal flow of birth and regeneration.

For philosopher Michel Foucault, ‘heterotopias’ designates real or imagined spaces of escape/departure, transformation, or revelation. The works explore a world or existence beyond earthly reality: The other realms of existence. The imagery is inspired by macro images of human anatomy and single-celled organisms, which are exquisite in their ornamental morphology, and displaying complex patterns of growth, reproduction, movement and mutability.

For Mehra Chawla, within the simple configurations of the single-celled organisms, the entire mechanics of evolution is revealed. She revisits the ideas of sensuous exuberance with an underlying sense of desire and decay, layers within the cyclical layers of life, forms within forms, worlds within worlds. In this latest series of paintings, the female form has an uncompromising centrality in the work, where the woman’s body is at the centre of love, life cycles and decay in a surface populated with hybrids of plant, flower, animal, and polyp. It is within this constellation that organic composites calibrated between ripeness and rottenness exists, blurring the lines between human, animal, plant and object to produce complex emblems of sexuality. Images of beauty and exuberance are infused with a sense of the macabre and both time and space are impregnated with a sense of heightened reality.

Image: © Sonia Mehra Chawla, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery