Looking, recoiling, being seduced. We Can't Go Back is a group exhibition comprised of works in which the tension between beauty and the transitory, and between strength and vulnerability, is heightened while it nonetheless remains elusive at the same time. In his tactile alabaster sculptures Hans Hovy, for instance, plays subtly with the notions of curiosity, desire and voyeurism. And in a life-size female nude, Elisabet Stienstra combines gentle and highly seductive refinement with ferocity. That elusiveness also surfaces in the abstract works of Benjamin Roth and Jugoslav Mitevski, who make their delicate and sensitive sculptures in fact with crude building materials.
But We Can't Go Back is also about the times in which we live, with supposed certainties disappearing; when nothing is what it seems and new developments are making us look at the world differently once and for all. We can't go back. But we can go forwards,
writes Emma Talbot on one of her drawings. It won't be the same. It could get better.
