On Figure and Setting
June 6, 2026 - July 3, 2026
Opening: Saturday 6th of June 2026 4PM - 6PM
Artspace Warehouse is pleased to present On Figure and Setting, an exhibition bringing together artists who examine how context shapes figuration. Across these works, the figure is developed in active relation to setting, atmosphere, and surrounding space. Context carries weight equal to subject, shaping how presence is perceived and how the subject comes into view. Together, these paintings show how environment can sharpen, complicate, or transform the terms through which a figure is seen.
Within the exhibition, setting operates as a generative element that sets scale, directs attention, and establishes mood. As the painted world gathers force, the subject no longer stands as the image’s single point of emphasis. Meaning begins to reside in the conditions that surround it, whether in the architecture of a street, the enclosure of an interior, or the atmosphere of a constructed scene. From there, perception begins through sensation, memory, and spatial recognition.
Erin Hammond uses setting to suggest the interior condition of the figure. Her layered use of pencil, charcoal, oil, and acrylic leaves rough line and tonal variation visibly active, keeping the image open rather than fixed. Within that openness, the surrounding space takes on interpretive force. It shapes the reflective, tense, or unsettled qualities the figure carries, so that mood arises through the setting as much as through the subject itself.
Ekaterina Ermilkina is known for cityscapes shaped by light, movement, and architectural scale. Her palette-knife surfaces give the city a vivid physical presence, allowing the viewer to register the subject through the sensory force of the surrounding scene. In her work, the setting makes the figure’s experience more palpable, translating the visual intensity of urban life into painterly form.
Valerie Etitinwo uses setting to sharpen the figure’s social presence. Her paintings rely on bold color, exaggerated form, and a surrounding space that feels deliberately arranged rather than incidental. That structure gives her subjects a strong sense of attitude and self-possession, making the viewer aware of how they are being presented as much as who they are. In Etitinwo’s work, context heightens the tension between observation, performance, and identity.
Tommy Lennartsson’s paintings take shape in a space that feels open, associative, and untethered to ordinary logic. His figures exist in a world that feels invented rather than observed, surrounded by forms, objects, and fragments that resist literal reading. Meaning emerges through suggestion, shifting the viewer away from narrative certainty and toward a more immediate response to mood, sensation, and visual play.
Melanie Tiongson’s paintings unfold in spaces shaped by memory, play, and imagination. Vintage Filipino texts remain visible beneath her painted surfaces, where blocks of color, graphic forms, and childlike figures build scenes that feel whimsical on first encounter and more deeply rooted as they unfold. Folklore, history, and personal imagination meet within the setting itself, giving her subjects a broader emotional and cultural surround. In Tiongson’s work, setting becomes the place where imagination and memory meet.
Since the opening of Artspace Warehouse in 2010, the gallery continues to be an industry leader in affordable, museum-quality artworks making collecting art accessible and budget-friendly. With one gallery in Zurich and two galleries in Los Angeles, Artspace Warehouse specializes in guilt-free international urban, pop, graffiti, figurative, and abstract art. The expansive 5,000-square-foot space offers a large selection of emerging and established artists from all over the world.
