Egle Jauncems: Some images, some manuals

9 December 2021 – 15 January 2022

OPENING Thursday 9 December 2021, 6 – 8pm

PALFREY presents Some Images, Some Manuals, a show of new works by Egle Jauncems.

Jauncems’ visual analysis revolves around found imagery, textual fractions and overheard conversations. Working across painting, sculpture, and assemblage Jauncems works are surrogates for her research interests and roving eye. Men, more specifically historical depictions of men, frequently form the source material for her work. There is a bathetic quality to these figures, take Napoleon Bonaparte painted in full regalia, or Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach as such examples. Another, more recent, figure was Lithuanian cobbler Paulinas Kaluina (1933 – 2017). Forming the inspiration for Jauncems’ pieces in Some Images, Some Manuals are just a few of the 200 weaving patterns drawn by Kalunia, none of which were woven in cloth in his lifetime. It is these unrealised black and white patterns, evocative of contemporary QR Codes or mathematician John Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ which led Jauncems to cannibalise her previous paintings and weave her own take on Kalunia’s designs, making dense and robustly presented wall-based pieces.

Some Images, Some Manuals sheers thought different centuries and different cultures to propose the gallery space as a machine of sorts, say a loom, on which Jauncems has woven the different strands of her practice to create a fertile tension between the rational and irrational, contemporary and primitive, the relevant and irrelevant.

Egle Jauncems (born, 1984, Vilnius, Lithuania. Lives and works in London). Recent shows include: Patterns, Paulinas Kaluina House, Skapiskis, 2021; Re-Enchanted Matter, APT Gallery, London, 2020; GOLOSO, Slate Projects, London,2018; Laesae Majestatis; Siegfried Contemporary, Saanen, 2018; Malnutrition, Galerija Vartai, Vilnius, 2017; Dausuva; MartynasMazvydas National Library of Lithuania, Vilnius, 2017; Demimonde, Slate Projects, London,2015; Khobz, Marrakesh Biennial, 2014; Textile Triennial, Lodz, 2012. She was the 2015 recipient of the David Hockney Art Foundation Scholarship at the Royal College of Art.

*Untitled 1*, 2021, oil on linen and canvas, 85 x 50 cm

*Untitled 2,* 2021, oil on canvas, 86 x 72 cm

*Untitled 3*, 2021, oil on linen, 132 x 110 cm

*Untitled 4*, 2021, oil on linen, 84 x 103 cm

*Untitled 5*, 2021, oil on linen, 41 x 39 cm

*Untitled 7*, 2021, oil on linen, 101 x 115 cm

*Untitled 8*, 2021, oil on linen, 75 x 64 cm

photography: Damian Griffiths.