Artist Elena Magerramova

Curated by Olivia Tegli

Online exhibition — opened 13 July 2023, ongoing

There is a children's toy — called in Russian a nevalyashka, a roly-poly — that cannot fall down. You push it, it tilts, it sways, and then slowly, without hurry, it returns. As a child, Elena Magerramova was not charmed by this. She was troubled by it. The outside told her nothing. The answer was somewhere inside, hidden, shifted slightly off-centre — a weight you couldn't see but could feel working.

She never really stopped asking.

This series of watercolours is what that question looks like when it stops being a question and becomes a way of painting. Each work carries a visible centre of gravity — a dark, dense accumulation, pigment pulled together and deepened, heavier than everything around it. You see it immediately. You think: there it is. And then the surrounding forms — soft, rounded, transparent, without a single hard edge — begin to move. Or rather, you realise they were always moving. The centre holds, but it doesn't fix. It tilts the whole composition into a slow, continuous swing.

Magerramova does not compose these paintings so much as she enters their physics. She lays down a mark, a weight appears, the soft forms respond, and the whole thing begins to sway. She cannot stop it by deciding to stop — the painting stops when the swaying quiets on its own. What remains is not a resolved image but a moment of stillness between one movement and the next.

Neverland is not a place you cannot reach. It is a state you cannot hold. Always after one swing, always before another. The centre is there — you can see it, dark and certain — but the form will not let you fix it. The roly-poly returns, and returns, and returns. Not because it wants to. Because that is what it was built to do.

The exhibition exists online by choice, not circumstance. These works have always been about distance — about the gap between seeing something and grasping it. A screen does not diminish that gap. It is that gap. You look at the dark weight at the centre of each painting and you know something is there. You just can't quite get to it from here.

Which is, of course, the point.