APSARA & von Goetz are pleased to announce ‘lasting echoes’ at our shared studio space. An intimate group exhibition, it evokes elements of ephemerality and resonance, from articulations of landscape to the sensations evoked by temporalities. Bringing together four artists who explore the shifts in our environment – works by Martine Poppe, Alina Vergnano and new commissions by Mark Jackson and Bregje Sliepenbeek – ‘lasting echoes’ delves, across multiple mediums, into contemplations of impermanence and what we retain. Emphasising memory and movement, the works speak to the tension between what ripples on, and what is maintained.

Bregje Sliepenbeek, Hellas 2024, Aluminium, mdf, 70 x 100 cm

Bregje Sliepenbeek’s practice revolves around the transformation of materials. She is fascinated by the metamorphosis she can impose on metal, the magic of reshaping a cold, hard material into something soft and organic. The flat aluminum sheets she uses morph under her hands into curved, pillow-like forms, almost bodily. Bregje explores the material’s possibilities in a tactile manner, as if she cannot bear the hardness of the metal and wants to imbue it with feminine softness. This results in installations and relief sculptures often containing botanical and historical architectural references. 

Martine Poppe lives and works in London and Oslo, and graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art BA and MFA in 2011 and 2013 respectively. Poppe’s practice includes painting and sculpture, and merges new technologies and materials with traditional techniques, in order to address environmental issues within the contemporary human experience. Poppe’s oil paintings start as digital sketches based on photographs, broken down into colours, textures and forms, treating these elements as if they were paint. Poppe’s works often depict nature warped by digital interference, and she is currently working on two series, Cloud Library (2017-) and The Earth in Search of Magic Tidings (2021-). Cloud Library documents the sky seen from airplanes, placing the viewer above the clouds. The digital process creates dark pixels that pollute the image, Biography 2024 while the brushstrokes resemble pixelation, highlighting the intersection of nature and human intervention.

Alina Vergnano is an Italian artist based in Oslo. She holds an MFA from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Bergen. With the line as a point of departure, she explores concepts of fluidity, time, and entanglement working at the intersection between painting, drawing and poetry. On her large-format canvases, she uses dry pastels, paint, and water applied in washes, to create dynamic and monumental images where the figure dissolves into abstraction. As the figure’s boundaries fade into gesture, the focus of her work shifts to sensation, turning the body into a place of feeling, a non-contained and open subject, fluid and multifaceted as experience itself. Her paintings are often presented in site-specific installations that engage with architecture or natural landscapes, and with the body. While the scale of the works encourages a movement in space, the fluid quality of the images and their spatial juxtapositions suggest a continuous state of unfolding, where multiple readings can coexist.

Mark Jackson makes emergent paintings, whose imagery and narrative evolve during the their making. His studio acts as a vast repository of fragments—of colours and textures, strange materials, quick drawings, and cut-outs, that circulate together until they find a new resonance on canvas. This approach creates a vitality in image-making, where a certain freedom, surprise and respect towards uncertainty are played out. Mark studied BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting at Loughborough University (1998), and MA (Distinction) Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design (2006). He collaborated as part of Jackson Webb (2003—2010). He’s had solo shows at Block 336, London (2017), and recently presented ‘turtles all the way down’, an exhibition of large-scale paintings and a sculptural installation, at OHSH Projects, London (2023). He’s exhibited nationally and internationally. He also curates, writes and conducts interviews with other artists, most recently with Richard Aldrich.