Arca

The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is delighted to announce a solo exhibition of works by multidisciplinary artist and musician, Arca (b. 1989, Venezuela). Presented in London for the first time, Arca's exhibition at the ICA brings together paintings from the Angels series. Broadly similar in scale, the works share recurring motifs, compositional echoes and a recognisable visual language, creating a strong sense of relation across the exhibition. Some are pared back and self-contained; others are denser, more diffuse or more turbulent in feel. Together, they register different states within a shared approach to gesture, surface and form. Made with paint, marker and other mixed media, the paintings unfold through layering, revision and interruption. Forms gather and recede; marks accumulate, blur and return. At moments, something bodily or figure-like comes into view, but the image does not settle into stable representation. Instead, the works remain suspended between emergence and dissolution, force and restraint, concentration and drift. As a multidisciplinary artist, Arca works across sound, performance, image and other media without allowing any one medium to become definitive. Painting gives material presence to concerns that run through her wider practice: intensity, instability, distortion, vulnerability and release. Marking Arca's return to the ICA, where she gave her first live vocal performance in 2014 in collaboration with NTS, Angels offers another way of encountering her work through scale, surface and presence. With thanks to Cory Scozzari and Cordova, Barcelona.