East, London
Kendall Koppe
Condo London 2025
Amanda WilkinsonAmanda Wilkinson hosting Kendall Koppe, Glasgow presenting Jimmy DeSana and Sevina Tzanou "Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all." —Kathy Acker Seduction is often a spilling over in excess, something that happens after a few too many drinks or when night falls and an artificial light shows up rouged lips and powdered cheeks in a glitter. A surrealist mishmash of limbs and skin. A lit cigarette between lips, face in a cloud of vapour. The logic of striptease is that arousal is about what is concealed as much as what is revealed. In one of DeSana’s images a nude woman stands over a suited body, camera aiming downwards, a playful inverse of the gender-standard voyeuristic scenario. DeSana understood the strangeness in desire. Often his nudes are plugged into everyday domestic objects: chairs, coathangers, ladders. Drained of the on/off gratifications that make up the simply pornographic, DeSana queers his objects in a way that makes the normative strange and the erotic and titillating strangely mundane. Desire on the move. Tzanou’s painterly marks – whether fluid twists or short violent stabs – come in glimpses and gestures. A face doubled in the mirror, or sinking Ophelia-like into bathtub water. On her canvases – and in her practice as burlesque performer – Tzanou plays with images of the femme as a material: to be exaggerated or abstracted, turned from glamour to grotesquery and back again. Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) has left an indelible mark on the history of photography. A fixture of the oft-mythologised downtown New York scene of the 70s and 80s, DeSana’s practice stretches from portraits of contemporaries – Laurie Anderson, Blondie, Talking Heads etc. – to the surreal, color-saturated, queer and avant-garde images that characterise his singular aesthetic. Recent solo / duo exhibitions include Ruins of Rooms, with Paul.P, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2024), Jimmy DeSana: Submission, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2023), The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy Deana and Marlon T. Riggs, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver (2020). Sevina Tzanou (b.1994, Greece) lives and works in Bonn, Germany. Tzanou studied in Düsseldorf under Katharina Grosse, Eberhard Havekost, and Yesim Akdeniz. Her most recent solo and group exhibitions include: The great Disastress, Kendall Koppe, Glasgow (2023), Final Fantasy, Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, Tallinn (2023), Spikes that bite, Margot Samel, New York (2023), Parties I am not Invited to, Robert Grunenberg, Berlin (2022). She has performed at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn and Kai Art Center, Tallinn (both 2023). Condo London 2025 is a collaborative exhibition involving 49 galleries across 22 London spaces.