HdM Gallery presents Island of the Fay, a duo show of works by painter Marcel·la Barceló (b. 1992, Palma, Spain; lives in Paris, France) and sculptor Apollinaria Broche (b. 1995, Moscow, Russia; lives in Paris, France) at Frieze Galleries, No. 9 Cork Street, London. The show is curated by Nick Hackworth who has written a critical text to accompany the exhibition.

The exhibition brings together two new bodies of works - a group of Marcel·la Barceló’s sensuous and beautifully chromatic, figurative paintings that depict often solitary figures in dreamlike landscapes, with a collection of bronze and ceramic sculptures by Apollinaria Broche of exquisite and lushly surreal, human-sized flowers and plants and diminutive, magical, sylvan creatures in various states of metamorphosis. The meeting of the works by these two artists with their mutually sympathetic thought-worlds, casts the show as a portal to an otherworldly place where human and more-than-human life and the mythic seamlessly intermingle as part of a dynamic, abundant and numinous whole. The exhibition takes its title from the eponymous essay by Edgar Allan Poe. One of his most ethereal texts, The Island of the Fay is a philosophical meditation in fictional form on the particular profundity of the solitary experience of the natural world and on the cycles of death and rebirth that shape existence. Poe’s The Island of the Fay is a text close to the heart of both artists. The paintings that Barceló presents in the show are animated by a powerful sense of entwined dualities. Island of the Fay, (2024) with its purple-red sky and reflective expanse of water, is redolent with a still, mysterious and lunar quality. Morel (2024) meanwhile features a mysterious and inviting figure standing on the shoreline with their silhouette and the bright and abundant landscape behind, reflected in the expansive water in the foreground. There is a powerful sense of a holistic vitality in the scene. It recalls the fundamental belief of animism in its many manifestations, including in Shinto in which nature spirits, or kami are worshipped, an idea important to Barceló. Elsewhere, figures in several paintings, as in Le Complexe d’Ophélie (2024), hold yogic poses that in both form and name often connect with nature and animals, symbolically hinting at the possibility of transformation. This line of thought and articulation find fuller, alchemically accented expression in Barceló’s painting of a mandrake, long associated with witchcraft, with a human head for a root. As always with Barceló work, the paintings here exhibit an incredible fluidity in their handling of form and a rich and by turns, delicate and powerful use of colour. Similarly to Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Barceló invites us to step into her paintings and into another world.