Elena Zhao: Capturing Shadows

Solo Exhibition: 5 August - 27 September, 2026

Opening Event: Saturday 8 August, 2-4pm

Standing beneath a painted ceiling, there is the feeling of light, its haloed, transcendent quality, falling from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. A sourceless radiance dissolves the edges of things, and, since her first solo show, Flux, in 2024, Elena Zhao has begun to master painting from inside that light.

Her sources are wide and unconfined, spanning centuries and hemispheres, from the opulent figuration of European old masters to the formal vocabulary of Eastern painting; the defining outline, the mythical cloud, space treated as something felt rather than measured. These elements surface as instinct, folded into brushwork until East and West become inseparable in the handling.

Faces remain unresolved, figures adrift in skies of Zhao's own imagining, indigo and pale citrine, teal and bruised violet. Colour arrives before meaning. These are not decorative paintings masquerading as serious ones, nor serious paintings that have borrowed beauty as a rhetorical device. They are, inseparably, both.

Capturing Shadows names what Zhao has always done: gathered the shadows of many things and held them together long enough for something new to emerge. The past is present not as homage but as living material, as pigment, as air. As light itself, still moving across the linen landscape.