Fade to Grief. Anna Mikholap

27 March – 19 April 2023

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In Fade to Grief, Anna Mikholap presents a suite of paintings that are both emotionally raw and philosophically refined. Known for her spectral approach to figuration and her delicate negotiation between presence and absence, Mikholap here turns toward something more corporeal—more creaturely. This exhibition, composed of four works rendered in oil and pastel on aluminium, places the viewer in the midst of a mourning that is no longer personal or symbolic, but elemental.

Mikholap’s earlier works often depicted partial human forms and domestic interiors, filtered through a poetics of memory. In Fade to Grief, those interiors have disappeared. The figures, too, are barely there. Three of the works depict canine forms—alert, folded, or collapsed—each rendered with a loose, anxious line and smeared fields of colour. These animals are not illustrative. They do not stand in for emotion. Rather, they embody it. Grief, in Mikholap’s hands, becomes not a subject, but a material behaviour: visible in the disintegration of form, the tension of the brushwork, the refusal of anatomical stability.

In a striking departure, the fourth painting introduces a human presence: a spectral male figure, almost completely overtaken by a field of red. He does not dominate the composition. He dissolves into it. There is no drama in his stance, no theatrical pathos. Instead, there is quiet erasure—a sense that whatever identity once resided here has been worn down by time, pressure, and pigment. In juxtaposition with the animal forms, this figure is not elevated, but fragile. His grief, like theirs, is beyond words.

This movement across species is not incidental. Mikholap’s work resists the idea that mourning is a uniquely human experience. Her dogs are not metaphors for loss—they are mourners themselves. She invites us to recognise grief as something shared across bodies, across skin and fur, across muscle and gesture. This posthuman framing gives her paintings a rare urgency. They are not depictions of sorrow. They are sorrow enacted through surface, gesture, and the collapse of structure.

Materially, Mikholap’s use of aluminium is central to the power of the work. Unlike canvas, aluminium does not easily absorb pigment. It pushes back, resisting the brush. This creates a visual language of struggle: marks that hover rather than settle, figures that smear rather than clarify. The image becomes a site of negotiation, a threshold rather than a window.

This exhibition does not offer narrative resolution. It does not ask to be understood or explained. Instead, it asks to be felt—slowly, attentively, with care. Each painting operates as a kind of residue: of an emotion, of a gesture, of a body. In an age dominated by visual immediacy and digital clarity, Fade to Grief insists on opacity, duration, and depth. It is a space of quiet intensity, where the viewer is invited not to look at the work, but to dwell within its unresolved silence.

Anna Mikholap paints from the edge—of memory, of form, of the self. In Fade to Grief, that edge bleeds.

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