Solids
Amilia Graham & Oberon Parry-Laidler
6 - 27 September 2025
Bolding is thrilled to present Solids, an exhibition of Oberon Parry-Laidler’s painting and Amilia Graham’s sculpture.
In the triptych series “Rust,” Parry-Laidler assembles an unlikely set of images: “Bialetti” features the silhouette of the iconic Bialetti espresso mascot rendered in De Stijl style, lifted from the side of a Bialetti-brand coffee cup; “Green Pastures” features a cow’s udders, mid-milking; and “REGOLIT” features the classic London domestic tableau of an IKEA “Regolit” model paper lampshade hanging from a ceiling.
The outer pair of paintings offer a particular spin on contemporary consumerism. By returning a Mondrian “collaboration” to canvas, Parry-Laidler wonkily exalts the mass commercial artist collaborations that are, by now, a staple of high street shops around the world. He lends a similar effect to the IKEA lamp, which takes its primary design inspiration from Isamu Noguchi’s Akari light sculptures. But then both pieces find themselves unsettled by the painting on the right, “Green Pastures”: this is a much more intimate and organic scene, and the lightness of Perry-Laidler’s touch renders it with the quality of a memory. The sense of disruption is intentional – the artist is interested in how these images can be interrupted through painting and how they act or react against each other through gesture, scale, and placement.
Before Parry-Laidler’s paintings, the sculpture that Graham has made in response to “Rust” arrives with a thud. It is an awkward lump — it feels useful, although it has no utility. It grounds the paintings, and the gallery, rather like a hearth generating a gravitational centre for a wintry living room. Graham adapts a solid and bodily sculptural language to the world of objects: her piece is a container, but its particular indeterminate abstraction allows the viewer to see what they will (a hoof, a tree stump, a pair of feet, a vulva). Through its formal allusions to craft practices of vessel making and ancient ‘Venus’ figurines, the sculpture achieves an awkward primitivism in response to the cool flatness of Parry-Laidler’s paintings.
The work of both artists flits across the spectrum of verisimilitude and abstraction, through the gestural application of paint and clay that renders their processes of fabrication visible. In so doing, Graham and Parry-Laidler enable a new and destabilising dialogue between familiar imagery and its subversion. Their work embodies the alienating effects of the mass reproduction of this imagery across an array of contexts – and invites us to reconsider our desensitisation to these icon-images and their status as part of the visual culture of everyday life.
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Amilia Graham (b.1998) is an artist based in London, who mainly works in sculpture and installation. Amilia studied Fine art and History of Art at Goldsmiths, graduating in 2022.
Oberon Parry-Laidler (b.1998) is a painter based in London. He graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2021.
Prices on Application. Please email sam@boldinggallery.com or esme@boldinggallery.com if interested.