Meet November’s Artists-in-Residence
Adelisa Selimbasic, Ellon Gibbs and Mia Chaplin
Adelisa Selimbasic
Adelisa is a recipient of this year’s Fountainhead Residency Artist Prize in partnership with Untitled Art Fair
Adelisa Selimbasic aims to create a world in which the sense of inadequacy does not exist – allowing for an unconventional perception of the body by playing withscenes from everyday life. With the use of the simplicity of the body, Adelisa transmutes the idea of Femininity, focusing her research on human complexities. The photographic format chosen by Adelisa recalls social media platforms, giving a sense of familiarity and false intimacy. The faces appear vague, representing subjective identities. The sitters maintain attitudes and are transformed into generational archetypes. The bodies begin to flow into each other, alluding to metaphors.
Currently, Adelisa's research is focused on the need, attraction, and tension of physical touch. The essence of the works is veiled by themes of body positivity, sisterhood, and feminism. Adelisa’s work has been exhibited in galleries across Italy and at the Fridman Gallery in New York. She currently lives and works in Milan.
Ellon Gibbs
Ellon is a self taught figurative painter working in the mediums of acrylic and oil paint on canvas. These tools set the ground for what he considers a door to understanding of the human and environmental conditions that we're currently experiencing. In his work, Ellon has developed characters that wear a sinister-yet-still expression, while highlighting their gestures in nature to show an almost disconnecting moment. This practice meditates on his inability to truly feel earth’s vibration because of the concrete and brick-walled surface that's continuously taking up space; there is a longing for nature that stems from frequent travels to Grenada in his childhood, where nature was the place you laid your head and worried less.
During Miami Art Week, Ellon will make his Miami gallery debut in a group exhibition at Primary Projects.
Mia Chaplin
Mia is a recipient of the Fountainhead Residency Artist Prize in partnership with Untitled Art Fair
Mia Chaplin is a painter who lives and works in Cape Town. Working in oil on canvas and paper as well as in bronze and plaster sculpture, her highly expressive works are characterized by their rich impasto surfaces and visible brushwork. Her loose style of painting is intuitive, heightening the emotion of her pieces. Chaplin’s works are her impressions of the female experience in relation to sexuality, sensuality, intimacy and violence. Since completing her BFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town in 2011, Chaplin has presented various solo exhibitions with galleries in Cape Town and Amsterdam. She has also extended her painting practice into printmaking, hosting a mini-exhibition of monotypes from the series, The Making of a Sharp Blade (2017), in collaboration with Warren Editions, Cape Town.
Chaplin has completed artist residency programmes at PM/AM Artist residency, London (2023), Cité Internationale Des Artes in the Marais district, Paris (2018), Nirox Arts Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa (2016) and at OBRAS Foundation in Alentejo, Portugal (2015).
