Exhibition Dates: 20th April – 27th May 2023
Exhibition Venue: OTP Copenhagen, Denmark
Do I Have to Love You? is a solo exhibition of oil paintings and ceramic sculptures, held at OTP Copenhagen, Denmark (20th April – 27th May 2023) The exhibition was initiated by invitation, via gallery owner Oscar Williamson. Eyres is represented in Scandinavia by OTP Copenhagen.
Eyres’ methodology includes the collection of source imagery from a series of educational books, published in Britain in the late 1980s and 1990s, intended to assist pre-teens and young adults navigate ‘difficult’ social situations. Covering such wide-ranging topics as divorce, adoption, smoking, drinking, romantic relationships, and bullying, these books attempted to offer an educational resource and social guidance where parents were absent or felt unable to initiate conversations. Eyres selects, scans, closely-crops and edits the highly performative photographs used to re-enact situations discussed in the books. Based on these images, the realist paintings instigate an extreme sense of closeness to the subjects and present moments from incomplete narratives that appear psychologically charged.
The paintings were exhibited alongside a series of ceramic sculptures reproducing variations in the book cover of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita. The books are hand sculpted, glaze fired, and fired again using ceramic transfers. The sculptures embody a symbolic weight as they evoke connotations of girlhood, predatory relationships, and childhood trauma. On a surface level, the sculptures draw attention to the varying efforts to personify and visually imagine the fictional character over a period of years and locations.