METAMORPHOSIS

Marking the 4th anniversary of the gallery, Metamorphosis brings together the work of Charles Khoury and Tim Ellis to reflect on the transformative power of art, material, and memory. The exhibition underscores not only the evolution of these two artists, but also the trajectory of the gallery itself, which has grown through long-standing relationships with both practices.

Charles Khoury occupies a special place in the gallery’s history. As one of the first artists to be exhibited here, he has developed a distinctive voice within our program and, through it, found recognition on the London art scene. Born in Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war, Khoury works largely from an intuitive and self-taught position, where memory and trauma become the ground for imaginative invention. His vibrant paintings are populated by his euphoric world of hybr idanimals and humans. By working with materials such as jute, he transforms modest substrates into charged surfaces, transmuting the weight of history into a language of resilience, escapism, and personal myth. His sculptural works, painted in luminous colours, extend these transformations into three dimensions, recalling ritual objects as much as children’s toys, and reminding us that metamorphosis is both an act of survival and of creative renewal.

Tim Ellis approaches metamorphosis from another trajectory, shaped by academic training and a deep engagement with art history. A Royal Academy graduate and an established name in the London art world, Ellis works with textiles, pillowcases and other worn fabrics, to reframe the everyday as symbolic carrier. By folding, scuffing, and distressing these materials, he inscribes them with traces of use and memory, endowing them with a patina of lived time. His works balance between relic and proposal: at once objects that seem to bear the weight of collective histories and speculative emblems. Drawing on the visual languages of design, banners, and standards, Ellis explores how meaning and value are assigned to cultural artefacts, and how such objects mediate the space between personal and communal identity.

Placed in dialogue, Khoury and Ellis stage two distinct yet complementary approaches to metamorphosis. Khoury channels the residues of conflict into an evasive, emotive world of figures and creatures, guided by instinct and heart. Ellis filters material culture through an art-historical lens, subjecting it to processes of wear and transformation that speak to collective memory. Both artists share a commitment to elevating humble materials: jute and cotton pillowcases, into artworks that shift between states, alive with symbolism and presence.

In bringing their practices together, Metamorphosis becomes a meditation on transformation itself: of trauma into catharsis, of the everyday into the emblematic, of the gallery into a site of existential dialogue.