Rebecca Ackroyd | Period Drama Preview Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, DE

Rebecca Ackroyd's inaugural institutional solo exhibition in Germany, titled "Period Drama," presents dreamscapes of the corporeal and ethereal, the tangible and intangible. Ackroyd's new works emerge as apocalyptic fantasies with a grounding in reality, delving into a critical exploration of the human body, subconscious memory, and spatial dimensions of sexuality. In her nuanced exploration of the feminine and the spiritual, she intertwines elements of boldness with vulnerability and seduction with disgust, thereby weaving a narrative that addresses identity, mental symbols, and patterns.

Her work seamlessly melds abstract and surreal elements, forming a coherent albeit enigmatic language expressed through intricate installations and body-like sculptures made from unconventional materials such as resin, wooden furniture, mechanical fragments, and plaster, as well as paintings and gouaches. In "Period Drama," the artist showcases her monumental turbine paintings in moments of reprieve alongside gouaches featuring dreaming eyes and abstract body parts, such as cast sculptures replicating her own body and everyday objects. Through a thematic spectrum ranging from the apocalyptic to the realistic and from the corporeal to the spectral, Ackroyd creates works that challenge fundamental aspects of human experience—time, memory, femininity, and fertility—against the backdrop of spatial and architectural constructions.

Her psychoanalytical and spiritual examination of the human mind manifests in a continuous engagement with her personal narratives and the collective memory of time. She grapples with the repressed and questions the reality of lost memories. Ackroyd reflects on individual and collective memories, weaving them into a fragmented yet captivating narrative. She presents a new, seductive, and simultaneously eerie installation in the dome and arcade hall, one that is both fragile and incomplete, as well as profoundly existent. Her works blend into an environment suspended between surreal landscapes and visceral immediacy, a threshold where viewers are encouraged to reconsider not only femininity and corporeality but also human consciousness itself.

Rebecca Ackroyd, born in 1987 in Cheltenham, Great Britain, currently resides and works between Berlin and London. She completed her Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and her Bachelor of Arts at the Byam Shaw School of Art, London.

Curators: Adam Budak, Alexander Wilmschen

Rebecca Ackroyd’s (b. 1987 in Cheltenham, UK) lives and works between London and Berlin. She received her Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2015 and her BA from Byam Shaw School of Art, London, in 2010. Ackroyd’s practice assembles painting and sculptural works into dream-like landscapes, often populated by ambiguously gendered figures in varying states of repose. Ackroyd’s work builds on a practice of constructing and examining space in order to pose themes of displacement and the interrogation of what may belong where. Her work stages encounters with ubiquitous, innocuous objects that are steeped with a sense of the uncanny, in order to excavate our cultural memory and explore how meaning is made. Recent solo exhibitions include Peres Projects, Seoul (2022), Peres Projects, Berlin (2021 and 2018), Fondazione Pomodoro, Milan, curated by Cloé Perrone (2019), and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, curated by Paul Luckraft (2017). Her work has been part of numerous group exhibitions, including CAPC musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux (2023), Aïshti Foundaton, Beirut, curated by Massimiliano Gioni (2022), Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, Rugby, curated by Sarah Holdaway (2022), Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany, curated by Michael Müller (2021), and  the Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Occitanie, Sète, curated by Tara Londi (2018). Ackroyd was part of the 15th Lyon Biennale, curated by the Palais de Tokyo. This fall, she has upcoming institutional solo exhibitions at the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover and the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France. Additionally, she will participate in a group exhibition at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, opening this October.