Vestiges

Annely Juda Fine Art announces Vestiges, an exhibition bringing together five contemporary painters concerned with memory, inheritance and traces of the past. Vestiges, from the Latin vestigium, refers to a footprint or visible sign of something that once existed but appears no more. The works in this exhibition touch upon myriad concepts such as myth, the subconscious, history, spirituality, the self and dreams, reinterpreting and transforming ideas through painting, so that the intangible becomes tangible.  Each work shares an impression of something ephemeral and transitory or existing in a liminal space and time.

Much of Jess Allen's work explores the theme of 'Presence through Absence'. Subjects such as empty chairs and sofas, books left behind by an absent reader, and empty theatres and cinemas, suggest the past presence of a person or people. The works shown here mark a new direction for Allen: self-portraits that turn the focus towards the face and the inner self of the painter. In repetition, Allen draws attention to the many variables held within a single subject. Through close cropping and obscured features, she reassembles the self as something fragmentary and provisional, a memory of who one is or has been, pieced together and re-examined. Rather than offering answers, these works think through the dilemmas one encounters within oneself over the course of a life, never arriving at a fixed image.

Laura Footes' practice draws on the subconscious and on her experiences of living with a chronic illness. Her paintings sit within the legacy of psychogeography, the city reimagined as an emotional and psychological terrain. The compositions become a self-portrait of sorts, each variation in texture and detail reflecting a different state of mind as she reconstructs her own environment like an architect. In some, the use of impasto and dense detail reflects the alienation, anxiety and struggle of city life. In others, brushstrokes become looser and more abstract, relating to the city as a place of self-discovery, of finding power in anonymity, and the freedom to reinvent oneself in a new place.

Paul Majek's work explores themes of memory through generational dialogue and spirituality. Drawing from family archives and personal narrative, and using layers of opacity and transparency, his paintings reflect an interest in loss and change, whether the loss of a family member, a physical home or of a former self. In The Pattern, a painting of the artist's grandparents, his grandmother's face is illuminated in blue and his grandfather's in orange. Majek's grandfather passed before he was born, but he was fortunate to have his grandmother in his life during his artistic development. Following her passing in 2024, the painting has become an object of remembrance for both of his grandparents.

Lauren Moses's work explores the endurance of visual languages, borrowing from classical figuration, religious iconography and cinematic tropes. The paintings in this show were made during a residency in London, developed through sustained encounters with the city's museum collections and the history of European painting. Drawing on fragments of historical images, Moses constructs fields in which figures and forms emerge, dissolve and recombine. Rather than treating history as a settled archive, she approaches it as something rewritten through perception and the materiality of paint, where inherited forms and the cultural assumptions they carry are reconfigured. This interest in the persistence of the past is reflected in the titles of her works, which draw on literature spanning from the ancient to the modern. Titles such as Wasteland, after T.S. Eliot's poem, and Eros the Bittersweet, after Anne Carson's 1986 essay, echo Moses's own concern with reinterpreting classical ideas for a contemporary context, allowing history to remain active, unstable and unfinished.

Cece Philips' paintings are an ode to looking and being looked at. Drawing on archive, film stills and memory, Philips creates compositions that explore voyeurism, positioning the viewer as a flâneuse within domestic interiors. In her works the figure is partially withheld, seen from behind through a curtained window, or glimpsed as a reflection in a mirror, present but never fully knowable. Windows, doorways and mirrors become framing devices that both reveal and conceal, heightening the tension between the private and the public self. Through light, colour and carefully constructed space, Philips imbues these interiors with a psychological charge, inviting the viewer to imagine narratives that remain deliberately unresolved.