A War With No Winner

Grove Collective’s recent exhibition A War With No Winner: Bodies and Their Spaces presents diverse lamentations on a unifying theme: bodies and the spaces they occupy. All four artists included negotiate bodies and their positioning in unique ways. Yet, all command the observer to consider their own body as a vessel through which to explore the world.  

Established late last year, Grove Collective was founded on the philosophy that the art world needs to reflect the increasingly globalised marketplace and to actualize a collective conception of what the art world can be. A War With No Winner ended on 12th of April, but can still be viewed on Grove Collective’s website, along with their previous exhibitions.  

Image of exhibition. Source: grovecollective.co.

Collectively, Shannon Bono, Kim Booker, Corinna Spencer and Sikelela Owen express through disparate styles something everyone can relate to: being human and inhabiting a body. From the delicate, soft rememberings of Owen’s works, to the powerful, self-assured women of Bono’s works, this collection of paintings is equal parts moving and invigorating.

Sikelela Owen, Damali and the Girls (Woman With Two Kids), 2021. Source: grovecollective.co.

Like memories of a time revisited in sleep, Sikelela Owen’s subjects typically include loved ones during moments of calm, infused with rich colours. Owen creates a sense of the intangible past through her brushstrokes, painting only the important detail and contours, rendering everything else superfluous. We are presented with a fragment of the artist’s memory, a depiction of a snapshot lost in time. The haze of distant memories is echoed in her softened brushstrokes, dissolving into the canvas. Caught between appearing and disappearing like a foggy memory we cannot recall completely, her work is intimate and emotional.

Shannon Bono, Wetin Yu De Luk?, 2019. Source: grovecollective.co.

Contrasted against Owen’s works are Shannon Bono’s powerful, unapologetically self-aware figures. Her subjects are poised in indifference to the onlooker’s gaze and expectations of female, Black subjects. Wetin Yu De Luk? (2019) is brimming with vibrant energy and declares Shannon’s mission as an Afrofemcentrist: asserting race, sex and class as a way of living, where black women are depicted by black women. The striking backgrounds of Shannon’s paintings are a symbiosis of fabrics from central and west Africa and biological structures and chemical processes of living organisms, allowing for multiple layers of meaning to emerge from her narratives.

Shannon Bono, Invasion, 2021. Source: grovecollective.co.

A War With No Winner also features the work of Kim Booker, showcasing her fragments of pose and more figurative works. There is an immediacy and looseness to Booker’s handling of paint in her figurative paintings. Booker’s expressionist painting technique of the figures that occupy her paintings is reminiscent of Tracey Emin, whilst the large blocks of colour, executed with gestural brush marks, echo the abstract expressionism of Willem De Kooning.

 Kim Booker, Bodies That Don’t Touch, 2021. Source: grovecollective.co. 

Kim Booker, Blue Curtain II, 2021. Source: grovecollective.co.

The writing scrawled across the canvases in Booker’s work reflects parts of conversations that stick in one’s memory throughout time. One wonders what precedes or succeeds these offcuts. Their haunting affect is comparable to Corinna Spencer’s fractured compositions, simultaneously familiar yet eerie, referencing the memory’s ability to distort and reshape events. Spencer’s dream-like compositions break down scenes into their component parts, evoking feelings of unsettling turmoil and inner conflict.

Corinna Spencer, A Woman In The Landscape, 2021. Source: grovecollective.co.

As a whole, A War With No Winner is exquisite, opening up a meaningful dialogue surrounding our perceptions of our own bodies, whose aesthetics carry relative insignificance in relation to what they enable us to experience.  

Visit Grove Collective’s website to view the exhibition, along with their previous exhibitions. All images sourced from grovecollective.co. 

Olivia Wilson 

Reviews Editor, MADE IN BED