About PM/AM
PM/AM is a London based contemporary art gallery, residency program, and incubator whose mission it is to reflect how we engage with art today. Dedicated to growing and nurturing emerging talent, as well as gaining exposure for artists without formal U.K. representation, the platform has organised exhibitions globally and events across its home city, using a flexible space model to accommodate the diversity and dynamism of the artists’ practices they showcase. It also has two permanent locations—one central, one west.
PM/AM has a reputation for discovering and helping to launch the careers of some of the most exciting contemporary artists of today. While its focus is on international talent, it also has a keen interest in UK based artists coming out of the country’s leading art schools. As well as maintaining a traditional exhibition programme, PM/AM is dedicated to finding new ways of working with the artistic community, expanding upon its shows with events, ongoing residency projects, and pilot schemes designed to connect collectors with the artists they love.
The London residency is of particular focus, further cementing the gallery’s commitment to growing and shaping artists’ careers by giving them a space to create and introducing them to the local artistic community. Rather than following the accepted representation model, PM/AM aims to facilitate ongoing support for the artists it works with through instinctive management beyond and outside of exhibition and residency collaborations.
PM/AM has been featured extensively in the press, garnering coverage from leading publications including The Times, Art Forum, The New York Times, Independent Magazine, The Guardian, Vogue, Vanity Fair, The Face, Dazed, Hyperallergic, Elephant Magazine, The Financial Times, Juxtapoz and Purple Diary.
Exhibition Text
Mia Chaplin’s paintings occupy a midpoint between figurative and abstract work, extending these into thematic dialogues that centralise human beings. Though caught in the unflinching gaze of a gentle, anonymous onlooker, the subjects of her work seem somehow distant and unreachable, symbols of the greater conscious web than clearly felt individuals.
Mia’s technique, resting heavily on impasto painting and bold brushwork, unifies the bodies within her intoxicating environments. A uniform tonality helps break down the boundary between person and place, leading us to believe there is a force at work that binds them together - their emotions are caught in leaves, their thoughts in the wind. In applying lines of tension into every corner of the work, Mia encourages a full exploration of her paintings that spills from the figures in the foreground to the settings they reside within, with little suggestion of distinction between them.
In preparation for painting Mia uses software to sculpt collages - preliminary realities that explore additive layering and glitching - that then emerge on the canvas. In this initial stage the academic and contextual process is explored, delving into art history and associated symbolism and mythology. Physical forms are stretched in and out of focus, eventually achieving a balance with their backdrops. Once transformed to painting, the nature of the material creates a second stage of elasticity, the push and pull of the brush creating a sense of flux, of life, which is retained as an illusion of motion.
Though painting from the vastness of the universal perspective, Mia incorporates autobiographical elements into her work, often deriving human forms from people existing in her life. This blending of the micro and macro is one of many dualities that make the work so enticing. We may also spot a contrast when calling into question the serenity of the work - considering the processes through which it comes into being, and the complexities of the human essence it promotes, an unnerving sense of tension, of violence, exists in the shadows. Mia’s bodies are vessels for stored trauma, sites that witness the full spectrum of life’s euphoria and tragedy.
“Often violence and softness are closely tied and overlapped - a duality that is often reflected in my work. This theme comes up often and I think is drawn from my gender and sexuality- as a woman attempting to balance power, protection and autonomy with a gentleness and vulnerability.”
- Mia Chaplin
In swerving the focused life of a single human in favour of collective humanity, we find in the work ideas that relate to our universal condition, our dreams and our struggles, people as physical and spiritual entities in need of protection. Her paintings, viewed as single expressions of ourselves, the nature that surrounds us and those mysterious, ineffable spaces, integrate these concepts in a harmony we may aspire to.
- Daniel Mackenzie, April 2023
CV
Mia Chaplin
Born: 1990, Durban, South Africa.
Lives and works in Cape Town.
Education
2011 - BFA. Michaelis School of Fine Art.
Solo Exhibitions
2022 - WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town.
2021 - No Man’s Art Gallery, Amsterdam.
2019 - No Man’s Art Gallery, Amsterdam.
2018 - WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town.
2017 - WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town.
2016 - WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town.
2014 - Salon 91, Cape Town.
Selected Group Exhibitions
2022 - Krone & Reservoir, Cape Town.
2022 - WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town.
2022 - Städtische Galerie, Wolfsburg.
2022 - No Man’s Art Pop-up, Mexico City.
2022 - No Man’s Art Gallery, Rotterdam.
2021 - Kummelholmen, Stockholm.
2021 - Cunningham Contemporary, Johannesburg.
2020 - IZIKO Museum, Cape Town.
2020 - BODE Projects, Berlin.
2020 - Gallery, Gallery, Johannesburg.
2020 - No Man’s Art Gallery, Rotterdam.
2019 - Bogardenkapel, Brugge.
2018 - Galerie Extérieure at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris
2018 - BKHZ, Johannesburg.
2018 - Barnard Gallery, Cape Town.
2017 - Warren Editions, Cape Town.
2017 - No End Contemporary, Johannesburg.
2017 - Cavalli Wine Estate, Cape Town.
2016 - Galerie Patries van Dorst, Wassenaar.
2016 - No Man’s Art Gallery Pop- up, Tehran.
2016 - The Castle, Cape Town.
2016 - Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town.
2016 - No End Contemporary, Johannesburg.
2016 - No Man’s Art Gallery, Shanghai.
2015 - WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town
2015 - UJ Art Gallery, Johannesburg.
2015 - Barnard Gallery, Cape Town.
2014 - No Man’s Art Gallery, Amsterdam.
2013 - Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town.
Residency
2023 - PM/AM, London.
2021 - No Man’s Art Gallery, Amsterdam.
2019 - No Man’s Art Gallery, Amsterdam.
2018 - Cité Internationale Des Artes, Paris.
2016 - Nirox Arts Foundation, Johannesburg.
2015 - OBRAS Foundation, Alentejo.
Collections include
Akzo Nobel Art Foundation
Norval Foundation
LAM Museum
Lavazza Collection
