Melting Beauty: Agustín Cárdenas, Nigel Cooke, Alekos Fassianos, Sally Gabori, Leiko Ikemura, Amorelle Jacox, Martha Jungwirth, Konstantina Krikzoni, Sean Scully, Arlene Shechet, Yinka Shonibare, Amy Sillman, Joan Snyder, Liliane Tomasko, Kaifan Wang & Kennedy Yanko

Featuring artists from a diverse range of generations and backgrounds, Melting Beauty aims to explore and celebrate the history and possibilities of beauty, that most contested and complicated of ideas. "Beautiful things are difficult", suggests a Greek proverb — and it’s in that difficult and shifting space where we find beauty at its most rewarding. Taking place on the Cycladic island of Antiparos, the exhibition will also draw on the history of Greek notions of metamorphosis and beauty, not least Eros, described by Hesiod in his Theogony as "the most beautiful of immortal gods, the melter of limbs".

Adapted from Friedrich Schiller’s notion of "melting beauty" in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), the title alludes to a history of beauty as an ameliorating force. Beauty, for Schiller, emerges out of the play between "taut" and "melting” forms of beauty — the tension between thought and perception, mind and sensuality. "Melting" beauty, in particular, relaxes or tempers a mind that has become too "taut", possessed by thought or a desire for certainty. In the work of Liliane Tomasko or Joan Snyder, there is a sense of constant change or transformation, a restless energy that seeks beauty anew with each mark. Beauty synthesises our hope for everlasting form with our mortal body, an idea palpable in the work of Konstantina Krikzoni or Leiko Ikemura. The image of "melting beauty" might also imply the forge of Hephaestus: the transformation of liquid metal into form, paint into image, sensation into idea, or vice versa. A beauty that melts also implies a state of flux; beauty is not a fixed or ideal form that we can identify. Beauty resets itself anew whenever we experience its ecstasy, and its form is perpetually refreshed by new iterations and artworks. Beauty demands that we find a space of contemplation between purity and contamination, entropy and transcendence.

The exhibition aims to create that space for viewers. Melting Beauty is curated with Craig Burnett.