CHARLES AVERY

A major solo exhibition focussing on the inhabitants and artefacts of The Island’s bustling port town, The People and Things of Onomatopoeia, was presented at Ingleby Gallery in the Summer of 2015 and was accompanied by a public commission in Waverley Station for the Edinburgh Art Festival 2015 and projects at the Parasol unit, London. A new publication continuing the narrative of of The Islanders titled Onomatopoeia: Its People and Surroundings was launched in 2016.

Avery’s The Islanders project evolves further as he situates elements of the town of Onomatopoeia within the city of Kochi for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala, including fly-posting bills advertising the Eternal Dialectic in the existing architecture of the city, in March 2017. Study #15. Untitled (The Ninth Resort) at the David Roberts Art Foundation, London presented a focussed display of Avery’s work accompanied by newly commissioned text by Nicholas Bourriaud (20 January - 8 April 2017).

Charles Avery’s solo exhibition, which was on view between September - December 2025, was titled The Eidolorama_– _in which, as the critic and curator Tom Morton has noted, ”_the sprawling complexity that characterises The Islanders is replaced by a radical economy of means.” _In Avery’s new realm, the ‘Unfix’d yet fix’d entities of entities’ appear as a procession of forms, figures, and occasionally anthropomorphic shapes which belong to a kind of otherworldly community – each element paradoxically distinct from the next, and yet completely interconnected, and seemingly born to live in each other’s company. In The Eidolorama it is as if the island’s horizon has been breached and we find ourselves in a place beyond, tipped into another world with extra-dimensional possibilities. By his own account Avery is exploring the form and content of these shapes for their own sake, guided by a set of mathematical principles and revelling in the painterly possibilities of edge and surface. They present, he says, ”a community of simple pictorial forms that comply and respond to the quadrilinear order of the rectangles that contain them... within this new matrix, one picture - or proposition - gives rise to the next - a primitive universe of simple and numerable parts... And while the paintings present as closed systems of purely abstract shapes, they also suggest worldly associations to apparently recognisable forms, such as keyholes, pills, planets, cells and sausages.”

Courtesy Ingleby