Wabi-Sabi: Untangling the Meaning of Beauty

About the Curator

Marcelle Joseph (b. 1966) is an American independent curator and collector based in the United Kingdom. Since 2011, Joseph has produced and curated over 50 exhibitions in the UK and the rest of Europe, featuring the work of over 400 international artists. Joseph holds an MA in Art History with Distinction from Birkbeck, University of London with a specialization in feminist art practice. Her curatorial work focuses on gender and the performative construction of identity. Joseph is the Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of Mimosa House in London and an

Ambassador of the Royal Academy Schools in London. She served as a trustee of Matt’s Gallery in London from 2018-2022 and served on the jury of the 2017-2019 Max Mara Art Prize for Women, in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery. She also collects artworks by female-identifying artists under the collecting partnership, GIRLPOWER Collection, as well as more generally as part of the Marcelle Joseph Collection. In 2023, she co-founded the GIRLPOWER Residency in southwestern France, an annual artist residency for femaleidentifying and non-binary artists.

Wabi-Sabi:

Untangling the Meaning of Beauty

Paul Smith Space proudly presents Wabi Sabi: Untangling the Meaning of Beauty, a group exhibition curated by Marcelle Joseph, showcasing the work of nine female-identifying figurative artists who seek beauty in balance and harmony as well as the imperfection of life.

The concept of wabi-sabi, with roots in ancient Zen Buddhism, originates in Japan. Whilst wabi translates to less is more, sabi refers to attentive melancholy, an awareness of the transient nature of earthly things and a corresponding pleasure in those that bear the mark of this impermanence. Each of the artists in this exhibition create

quiet, intimate artworks that clamour for beauty in everyday life. Utilising a spare organic line, a pale palette, or a judicious use of negative space, these artists construct harbours of solace in their works in direct contrast to our increasingly chaotic time on planet Earth. This economy of line, form and composition in the works represents an understated aesthetics that could be interpreted as ‘wabi-sabi’.

In many ways, the modest form of expression employed by each artist draws similarities to ikebana - the single flower in a vase that everyone bows to before taking their place at the tea ceremony table. And like the

tea ceremony, these artworks emphasise direct experience over verbal explanation, just as wabi-sabi is best understood in a non-verbal experiential way.

This type of beauty does not, however, correspond to the notions of ideal beauty espoused by the Ancient Greeks, or contemporary Western culture, steeped in patriarchy and late-stage capitalism. As Emma Dabiri writes in Disobedient Bodies: Reclaim Your Unruly Beauty (2023), “here others have prioritised balance, the achievement of harmony and the movement of flow, hegemonic Western culture is framed by the oppositional categories of good and bad, beautiful and ugly,

Artists Include Anna Ilsley

C Lucy R Whitehead

Chechu Álava

Gal Schindler

Grace Mattingly

Harriet Gillett

Lindsey Mendick

Sophie von Hellermann

Susie Green

perfect or flawed.” Yet, throughout non-Western history, Dabiri notes that beauty is sought within ‘the nature of things.’ It is found “not in products; not in things but in the relationships among them. Beauty is something you do, not just something you are.”

Painting and sculpting are activities, ones just like the ancient Japanese arts of the tea ceremony, and the cultivation of bonsai. Like the tranquil simplicity found in these activities, the beauty sought by these nine artists is a state of mind, reminding us to slow down and take comfort in the natural beauty around us, however imperfect or impermanent it may be.

Anna Ilsley

(b. 1982) Suffolk-based British artist who graduated from the Royal Drawing School, London, UK in 2010 and completed her BA in Fine Art Painting from the University of Brighton in 2006. Her myth-inspired paintings confront motherhood and the politics of the female body headon. Her vivid, fleshy figures push against the limits of the canvas, asserting presence, desire and power. Drawing on ancient myth, medieval and renaissance art as well as contemporary experience, Ilsley’s work interrogates how women’s bodies are controlled, revered and feared. Her paintings reframe female bodies as sites of agency and excess, challenging the historical and cultural narratives that seek to contain them.

Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include those at Winch Gallery, Britten Pears (with Hannah Lees), Suffolk, UK (2024); Benjamin Parsons x Hannah Payne, Oxford, UK (2023); Galleri Tom Christoffersen (with Dan Schein), Copenhagen, Denmark (2022); and Asylum Studios (with Jessica Jane Charleston), Suffolk, UK (2022). Selected recent group exhibitions include: Strings Attached Chapter II, Pipeline Contemporary, London, UK (2025); and Crab Bisque, St Chad’s Projects, London, UK (2022). Ilsley has taken part in numerous artist residencies, including British School at Athens, Athens, Greece (2013); and Newnham College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK (2021), for which she received an Arts Council Research and Development Award.

£2,040 inc VAT

Day 4 of the package holiday 2025 Oil on canvas on cradled board 42 x 30 cm £2,040 inc

Doubles 2025

Ultramarine pigment and gum arabic on watercolour paper (framed) 30 x 20 cm

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Last Leg 2025

C Lucy R Whitehead

(b. 1991) Makes figures that blur the line between body, object, and role, placing them in landscapes and interiors where they try on identities that never fully fit. The canvas holds these figures in suspension, like specimens preserved in a jar: contained, displayed, and turned into spectacle. Within each frame, they echo the boxes and stereotypes that organize daily experience, straining against boundaries that both define and restrict them. Through this push and pull, Whitehead is interested in how the body is encountered not as a fixed symbol or possession, but as something inhabited, exhibited, and continuously renegotiated.

Whitehead holds a BA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Art and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, where she was awarded the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship. She has had solo exhibitions at Megan Mulrooney Gallery in Los Angeles, Soho Revue in London and Incubator in London. She has also exhibited at NADA art fair in New York and Miami, Untitled Art Fair Miami and Expo Chicago, among others.

Chechu Álava

(b. 1973) Spanish artist based in Paris, France. Álava’s ongoing series of female portraits reclaim the male gaze and challenge the archetype and hierarchy presented by the male artist/female muse relationship. The starting points of Álava’s works are often reinterpretations of recognisable art historical works by male artists, photography, and historic moments of gender hierarchy. A gauzy, auratic atmosphere is often offset by the directness of the subject’s gaze. Álava’s portraits teeter on the edge of ghostliness amplified and unified by her soft-focus application of a palette of fleshy, pearlescent pinks and postmodern pastels. Offering up something of the otherworldly and strangely erotic, Álava’s paintings combine sex and spirit to conjure the creamy, dreamy, transubstantiated flesh of saints, angels and gods in the frescoes of cathedrals. Moody and existential they are imbued with a muted tenor of unspoken intensity common to many humans who currently identify as women, whilst celebrating the shared and common positionality of womanhood across the veil of time.

Solo exhibitions include those at the Thyssen Museum, Madrid, Spain; Meghan Mulrooney Gallery, Los Angeles, US; Cob Gallery, London, UK; Xippas Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland and Paris, France; Galería Alegría, Barcelona, Spain; and Bravin Lee Programs, New York, US. Álava’s work has featured in group exhibitions at Lychee One Gallery, London, UK; Museo Barjola, Gijón, Asturias, Spain; Smac Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; Instituto Cervantes, Rome, Italy; and Beers Contemporary Gallery, London, UK. In 2020, Álava presented her first major museum exhibition, Rebeldes, at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, Spain, which was accompanied by an artist’s monograph. In 2014, her work was selected by an international jury to be included in 100 Painters of Tomorrow, a book published by Thames and Hudson.

Gal Schindler

(b. 1993) Lives and works in London after completing a BFA at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2019 and a MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London in 2021. Schindler creates paintings whose figures appear to dance in oceans of colour, both alluring and unsettling, evoking a sense of mystery and intrigue. Through her paintings, Gal Schindler invites us to explore the deep spaces within ourselves and our relationship to the world around us, offering a unique perspective on the mysteries of the human experience. Meticulously painted, in a state she qualifies as meditative, her paintings are also markers of time - they tick off the seconds, the hours, the monthsand resonate with the living and the dead, presence and absence.

Selected solo exhibitions include those at 12.26, Dallas, US (2025); Ginny on Frederick, London (2024 and 2022); Sultana, Paris, France (2023), James Fuentes, New York, US (2022); Painters Painting Paintings, St Albans, UK (2022). Group shows include: Cuál es el peso de la luz, Pelayo Projects, Madrid, Spain (2025); On feeling, The Approach, London, UK (2024); The floating hour, Dans les yeux d’Elsa, Paris, France (2024); My reflection of you, The Perimeter, London, UK (2022); Reading stones, Linseed projects, Shanghai, China (2023); The earth has music for those who listen, Sapling, London, UK (2022); The New Romantics, The Artist Room, Seoul, Korea (2022); Civil Twilight, Ginny on Frederick, London, UK (2022); From Body to Dream, Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel (2023); and After Image, MAMOTH, London, UK (2020). Her work can be found in collections such as The Perimeter, Drawing Room, The Roden Collection, Cayre Art Group and Medianoche, among others.

Grace Mattingly

(b.1991) London-based American artist whose luminously bright and atmospheric paintings reflect on themes of gender and sexuality, play and improvisation, and fantasy and the unconscious.

Mattingly has been featured in artist publications such as émergent magazine and Art Maze Mag and is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields grant. She holds a BA in Philosophy from Columbia University, New York, US (2014) and an MA in Painting from The Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK (2021).

Mattingly’s work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions include those at Haricot Gallery, London, UK (2025); Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago, US (2024); Arusha Gallery, Bruton, UK (2024); Huxley Parlour Gallery, Miami, US (2022); Taymour Grahne, London, UK (2022); and Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, UK (2021).

Group exhibitions include: PAPER, Huxley Parlour, London, UK (2025); Neon Jungle Nocturne, Lychee One, London, UK (2024); Luminous Terrain, Atipografia, Arzignano, Italy (2023); New Mythologies II, Huxley Parlour, London, UK (2022); Four Painters & A Photographer, Grove, Berlin, Germany (2022); Intimacy, Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK (2022); Internal Weather, Sid Motion Gallery, London, UK (2022); MAMA, Prior Art Space, Berlin, Germany (2022); Coming In, Coming Out, Prior Art Space, Berlin, Germany (2022); Dream On, Grove, London, UK (2021); and A Chorus of Bodies, Liliya Gallery, London, UK (2021).

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Harriet Gillett

(b. 1995) British artist living and working in London. Gillett’s luminous, layered paintings respond to the rapidity of contemporary visual culture, offering an antidote through reverie and reflection. Drawing inspiration from the devotional aesthetics of Western religious art and the emotive vibrancy of PostImpressionism, her works exist at the intersection of traditional and contemporary forms. Through intimate snapshots of friends and community, layered with symbolic imagery, Gillett bridges personal memory and universal resonance. Her use of materials such as spray paint and veils of colour creates a tension between permanence and transience, echoing the blurred boundaries between past and present, experienced and imagined.

She received her MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds Art School, London, UK in 2022 after studying a BA in English Literature at Edinburgh University, Scotland, UK (2017). Group exhibitions include those at Brooke Benington, London, UK; Roman Road, London, UK; Delphian x Saatchi, London, UK; Badr El Jundi Gallery, Madrid, Spain; Tube Culture Hall, Milan, Italy; Edji Gallery, Brussels, Belgium; and Yusto-Giner, Marbella, Spain. Duo exhibitions include those at Soho Revue and New Normal Projects in London, UK. She has had solo exhibitions with LAMB, London, UK and Hot Sheet at Gallery Maison Bertraux, London, UK. She was shortlisted for the Ingram Prize in 2020 and was one of the 2023 New Contemporaries. Residencies include Good Eye Projects, London, UK; Xenia Creative Retreat in Hampshire, UK; and the Palazzo Monti Residency in Brescia, Italy

Lindsey Mendick

(b.1987) Margate-based artist who works primarily with ceramics, embedding her sculptures within installations that include stained glass, film, furniture, large stage sets and performance. Her autobiographical work offers a form of catharsis, encouraging the viewer to explore their own personal history through the revisionist lens of the artist.

Mendick received a BA from Sheffield Hallam University and an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London. She was the recipient of the Sky Arts Award in Visual Art in 2024, the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020, the Alexandra Reinhardt memorial award in 2018 and was selected for Jerwood Survey in 2019 and the Future Generations Art Prize in 2020. Mendick has participated in solo and group exhibitions at Jupiter Artland, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Hayward Gallery, Carl Freedman Gallery, Somerset House, Jeffrey Deitch, Cooke Latham, and Hannah Barry Gallery, among others. In 2025, she presented Wicked Game, an ambitious outdoor installation at Kenilworth Castle. With her partner, the artist Guy Oliver, Mendick initiated Quench Gallery in Margate to provide vital support for early career artists through exhibitions and mentoring.

A witch is born out of the true hungers of her time 2024

Over My Dead Body 2023

Sophie von Hellermann

(b. 1975) German artist living and working between London and Margate in the United Kingdom. Her paintings recall the look of fables, legends, and traditional stories that are imbued with the workings of her subconscious rather than the content of existing images. Her romantic, pastel-washed canvases are often installed to suggest complex narrative threads. Von Hellermann applies pure pigment directly onto unprimed canvas, and her use of broad-brushed washes imbues a sense of weightlessness to her pictures. Von Hellermann’s paintings draw upon current affairs as often and as fluidly as they borrow from the imagery of classical mythology and literature to create expansive imaginary places. In subject matter and style, von Hellermann tests imagination against reality.

She received her BFA from Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf and an MFA from Royal College of Art, London. Selected solo exhibitions include those at Sixi Museum, Nanjing, China (2025); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2025); Space K, Seoul, Korea (2025); Pilar Corrias, London, UK (2025, 2022 and 2020); Galerie Sardine, Amagansett, New York,

US (2024); Schloss Freienwalde, Bad Freienwalde, Germany (2022, commission); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2006); and Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen (2006). Selected group exhibitions include: Your Mind is Now an Ocean, Pilar Corrias, London, UK (2024); Wild NM, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico, US (2024); Sirens: Sophie von Hellermann and Anne Ryan, Turner Contemporary, Kent, UK (commission) (2021); Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2021); With a Capital P: Selections by Six Painters, Elmhurst Art Museum, Berlin (2019); Jahresgaben 2016, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2016); Empathy and Abstraction: Modernist Women in Germany, Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2015); I Cheer a Dead Man’s Sweetheart, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea (2014); In the disappearing mist, the gift of whispers, Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2012); Watercolour, Tate Britain, London (2011); Sophie von Hellermann and Josh Smith, le Consortium, Dijon (2009), Dear Painter, paint me…, Pompidou Centre, Paris (2002), and Trouble Spot Painting, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp (1999).

Lost Rings of Saturn 2026

Susie Green

(b.1979) Zurich and London-based British artist whose sensorial practice spans painting, performance, and sound. Throughout her work, dress, fetish, and disguise recur as regular preoccupations, with bodies adorned in preparation for pleasure, decompression, and release.

Solo and two person exhibitions include those at UNION, London, UK (2024); Quench, Margate, UK (2024); JW Anderson X AWITA, London, UK (2022); FRAC ChampagneArdenne (with Cathy Josefowitz), Reims, France (2021); Workplace, Gateshead, UK (2018); Five Years (with Kim Coleman), London, UK (2018); and Grand Union, Birmingham, UK (2017). Performances include: She Has a Problem Being the Good Girl, CRAC Occitanie, Sète, France (2025); Frou Frou Feelings (with Harriet Pittard), Doña, London, UK (2024); The Hold, Tate St Ives, Cornwall, UK (2019); Club Goddess, Kunstraum, London, UK (2020). In 2026, Green was awarded an Abbey Painting Fellowship at the British School at Rome. In 2025, her work was acquired by the Arts Council Collection, UK.

Origin of Glory 2026

Watercolour on paper 24 x 19 cm

Sacred Relations (After Tessa Boffin) 2026

Watercolour and pencil crayon on paper

38 x 28 cm

£960 inc VAT

Double Eruption 2026

Watercolour on paper

Watercolour on paper 24 x 19 cm £720 inc VAT

Watercolour on paper 24 x 19 cm £720 inc VAT

Watercolour on paper 24 x 19 cm £720 inc VAT

Prezioso (Precious) 2026

Watercolour on paper 24 x 19 cm £720 inc VAT

Enmeshed Fantasy 2026

Watercolour on paper 24 x 19 cm £720 inc VAT

Deep Body 2026

Watercolour on paper

x 19 cm

Lace Ritual 2026

Watercolour on paper 24 x 19 cm £720

For all art enquiries please contact:

Katie Heller

Art & Exhibitions Manager katie.heller@paulsmith.co.uk

Audrey Dennis Gallery Assistant audrey.dennis@paulsmith.co.uk

Paul Smith

9 Albemarle Street

London W1S 4BL

+44 (0)7553 352 959

+44 (0) 207 493 4565

Paul Smith Space, found downstairs at 9 Albemarle Street, is a dedicated gallery presenting artwork which resonates with the company’s ethos of creativity, individuality, and curiosity. A full programme of exhibitions will see Paul Smith Space change periodically throughout the year, each time introducing an exciting new array of work. art@paulsmith.co.uk