July 2025: Group Exhibition Mythic Manifest

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The Artists

The human body, the skin, serves in Anika Hochstenbach’s paintings as a landscape in which stories unfold. With her brush she is feeling her way across the surface of the body in search of the hidden details that reside within the skin. In her Lichaamscompositie series, she is guided by the mesmerizing folds and forms that merge when the body curls up. By portraying people whose appearance she knows most intimately – in this case, her mother – she seeks a deeper way to get under someone’s skin. Through a dreamlike sense of estrangement, Anika evokes the feeling of belonging that we sometimes experience in nature. She draws inspiration from the ancient personification of natural forces in myths and sagas. By playing with the idea that human figures can merge into forms in nature at any moment, Anika creates a magical playground for herself. Does nature take on a human appearance, as with the Greek gods? Or does the body -like Daphne- transform into nature itself?

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A lot of my inspiration comes from classical painting and sculpture. How a lone hero is lit and displayed in a mostly desolate landscape in the depictions of Hercules by Francisco de Zurbarán. A softly painted sky in an English landscape or idealized muscular bodies carved from marble in ancient Greek statues. These influences are integrated into my visual language where they form relationships with earlier collected imagery, all with their own symbolic significance. Humor is important, classical images are brought to the present in a witty way. A two-man horse costume with bare human legs that somewhat resembles a Trojan horse.

Horses function as the perfect vehicles in my work for a multitude of stories and or emotions. To me they are the perfect balance between hard and soft, masculine and feminine. This shows in their strength and grace as well as the associations with the horse in general (Horse girls, every major battle in history up until the 20th century. In a way I aspire to be like the horse, in balance as well.

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Flowers are objects often revered, but to cut a living being and place it in a vase is to desecrate that perfection. To display a beautiful object as it slowly dies is the height of sacrilege, and yet we do so as an act of love.

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Her current work examines the archetypal motif of dismemberment as a transformative process in myth, alchemy, and psychology. Drawing on figures like Osiris and the cosmic man, Powell explores the fragmentation of the self as a necessary phase for rebirth, where dissolution becomes creation. Through a feminist lens, she engages with the embodied and vegetal aspects of alchemy, rejecting mind-body dualisms and promoting a regenerative model rooted in nature and transformation.

Powell works across various mediums, including ceramics, glass, textiles, and painting, to express archetypal imagery. Her recent research into 15th- and 16th- century alchemical manuscripts informs her practice and blends with her exploration of mythology and personal inner work.

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Kolpa’s paintings often depict women resting or playing in nature which are disrupted by mechanical or patriarchal intrusions. This duality gives the image an eerie and alienating presence. She draws inspiration from folklore, actuality, pop culture, the digital world, the painting tradition and her own subjectivity, merging them into an image which seems to take place in between something mythical, normal and disturbing.

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As the title of the work suggests, this painting is a daughter of the night, literally. The night is my favourite time to work in – ideas cluster in my mind without my having to summon them. Here in ‘Leila’, I wanted to paint what the night is like in my head, with its starbursts of concepts and connections. 
‘Leila’ is a name I have always loved, even more so since discovering the Leila and Majnun legend. This tale of doomed lovers appears in countless versions in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Indian and other Eastern traditions. I’ve become entranced by it. The story portrays love as deeply romantic, even spiritual. It is a completely different angle from the way love is presented in Graeco-Roman mythology, which I’ve mined for my earlier work. Western myths tend to present love as physical, purely erotic. In contrast, the bond between Leila and Majnun is sublime, transcendent. I’m drawn to this tradition’s sympathy for a love that is so extreme that it alienates and unmoors the lovers from reality and can lead to what society condemns as irrational

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My paintings present a twilit, hallucinatory world haunted by the presence of the human figure. Light falls on flesh. Bodies coalesce with their surroundings. Painting twilight allows me to conjure an in-between realm in which erotic intimacy and transgression can occur and chimeras can emerge. Drawing on the language of myth I use the figure to channel archetypes that are both ancient and subversively personal. Ultimately I explore the desire and disquietude of the human experience through my life as a queer person in both the city and rural isolation, and through myth as a vessel for transformation and ambiguity.

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This painting depicting the Celtic goddess Brigid intertwines themes of mythology and mirrors, emphasizing her multifaceted nature as a goddess of healing, poetry, and smithcraft. Brigid is often portrayed holding or standing beside a mirror, symbolizing truth and revelation, which aligns with her role as a divine figure who reveals hidden knowledge and inner truths. Mirrors in Celtic mythology are not mere reflective surfaces but sacred tools that serve as gateways to spiritual insight and self-awareness.

This rendering of Brigid subtly invites viewers to actively engage with the image, transforming them from passive observers into participants in the work. The mirror serves as a symbolic invitation, prompting us to consider our role in the act of looking and reflecting on the goddess’s self-awareness.

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Lee’s works are deeply rooted in storytelling, often drawing on personal and cultural narratives. This particular painting narrates a story of how his grandfather returned to his grandmother, symbolizing themes of reunion and love. The golden sky overhead evokes a sense of timelessness, connecting this intimate moment to broader mythic themes of reunion and eternal bonds found in many stories from the past. Through this painting, Lee mixes personal memories with universal symbols, showing how stories from history and legends still shape how we see love and connection today.

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The painting depicts a dense cluster of dark, balloon-like forms underneath an umbrella, through which a pair of watchful eyes emerge. The ambiguity of the figure and the unsettling mood challenge viewers to project their own interpretations, drawing on their own personal myths or cultural narratives.

Balloons which are typically mundane and celebratory objects are painted in dark tones which makes them feel ritualistic, almost funeral like.

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Painted in response to a series of direct drawings of the spring and early summer sky, Sky of the Twice-Born explores abstraction as a mythic and emotional space. Built up in layers of oil stick and soft pastel, the work is intuitive and sensory—marked by a physical engagement with colour, gesture, and contradiction. A vibrant red disrupts the calm of violets and blues; acidic yellows clash with soft pinks and grounded greens. Nothing settles.
The work is rooted in the Welsh myth of Gwyn and Gwyrthyr, two brothers doomed to battle each May Day for the love of Creiddylad—a story of desire, rivalry, and the cyclical tension between summer and winter. This painting becomes a psychic sky where myth plays out not through figures, but through atmosphere, through colour, through a battlefield of marks.
The “twice-born” sky speaks to both the ancient and the immediate—to the way stories repeat themselves in new forms, and how we carry that repetition in our bodies and our gaze.

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Her work draws from traditional feminine techniques such as dyeing and stitching, layered with intuitive symbolism, spectral motifs, and atmospheric sound. Her performances and music extend the emotional architecture of her visual practice—opening portals into a psychic world shaped by intuition, sensation, and quiet resistance.
Motifs and symbols emerge organically throughout Wu’s work, often inspired by automatic writing and intuitive processes. Fragmented figures, spectral signs, and mythic presences act as gateways into the psychic realm, inviting moments of revelation and connection beyond literal interpretation. These symbolic languages resist closure, opening a space for the unconscious to surface and speak in image, gesture, and atmosphere.

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