MPM Gallery is pleased to present Shadowplay, a two-person exhibition featuring the works of Alexandra Duprez and Gosia Machon. Curated by MEPAINTSME and hosted by DON'T LOOK ANNEX, Los Angeles, the exhibition opens to the public on Saturday, June 6, with an opening reception from 5 - 8 PM.

Like passing silhouettes in an 18th-century théâtre d'ombres, the intimate worlds of Alexandra Duprez and Gosia Machon both operate at the threshold of visibility. While their technical approaches remain distinct, these artists utilize a formal reduction to prioritize contour over descriptive detail. Here, the visible image is perpetually doubled by the weight of what is withheld—an explicit absence that functions as a psychic space for the viewer. Through an economy of cut paper and nuanced brushwork, Duprez and Machon move away from declaration in favor of suggestion, evoking narratives that resist resolution and demand the active participation of the imagination.

Hailing from France, the drawings, paintings, and collages of Alexandra Duprez interpret the human form through a delicate balance of abstraction and symbolic gesture. Stripped of interior detail, her silhouetted hands and dismembered limbs persist as contour alone—often collaged onto raw paper surfaces to define their edges against infinite space, a boundary that both defines and withholds. In this reduction, something essential emerges: not the fullness of the figure, but the very condition of its appearing.

The power of German artist Gosia Machon’s atmospheric inks and watercolors lies in their economy. As forms hover between recognition and abstraction—recalling the fleeting impressions of memory or indistinct figures glimpsed at a distance—a choreography of shapes emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure across luminous, atmospheric washes. Unconscious desires for untouched nature are evoked, yet never fully resolved. As Machon states, “This swan, this tree, this flower—I have not seen them anywhere with my eyes, but the sensation they express, it exists, it is real.”

As Jun’ichirō Tanizaki writes in his essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, beauty does not reside in the thing itself, but in the patterns of the shadow it casts; indeed, without shadow, beauty cannot emerge. The flattened form of a shadow described here is not a secondary effect, but a primary condition—an image that insists on its own mediation, much like candle light within a darkened interior, perception unfolds gradually and without full disclosure.