Curator Margarida Mendes Presents 11 Artists Exploring Abstraction Through Altered States and Digital Methods

Curator Margarida Mendes organized an exhibition featuring 11 artists who investigate abstraction using methodologies like stream-of-consciousness, synaesthesia, visual hallucination, and fluid computation. Tamara Henderson created Kressengarten Chair (Nurnberg) (2013) after hypnosis sessions, resulting in a plaster composite that resembles a chair but is non-functional. Chris Martin's painting Untitled (2007) expands beyond the canvas edges, reflecting his studies of psilocybin mushrooms. Max Eastley's Drawings for Color and Music Projects (1968) translates a Bach fugue into color codes, exploring synaesthetic associations. Kareem Lotfy produces 3D sculptures and binary-generated drawings, intervening with bodily gestures on a digital pad to create works that blend calligraphy traditions with contemporary technology. Diogo Evangelista focuses on North African carpet-making, documenting patterns that represent cosmic chaos and order in a video with experimental electronic and traditional Persian and Tunisian music. Eduardo Kac's holopoem Maybe Then, If Only As (1993) requires viewers to shift positions to decode holographic words, creating cross-associations. James Whitney's 16mm film Lapis (1966) features hand-drawn forms merging under varied light sources, examining perception. The exhibition explores liminal spaces between vision and neural cognition, suggesting what lies beyond the visual through abstract approaches. It was reviewed in September 2013.