CHRISTINE AY TJOE: COVERED AND COVER
White Cube is pleased to present Covered and Cover, Christine Ay Tjoe's solo exhibition with the gallery.
June 27 – August 16, 2025
Exploring notions of family silence and painting-as-catharsis, Christine Ay Tjoe’s first solo exhibition in the US debuts a new series revolving around the primacy of expressive gesture and a motif of blood. Borne out of processing the death of a parent and navigating the unspoken, the artist meditates on intergenerational relationships and the role of family silence in burying conflict and pain. The exhibition title refers to Ay Tjoe’s ongoing process of emotional fortification; speaking to a personal yet universal experience of grief, her paintings carry with them ‘a kind of spirit – one that seeks to cover, and cover again.’
Ay Tjoe has developed her unique visual language over decades, one which combines amorphous abstract forms, tangles of sinuous lines and areas of riotous painterly gesture suggestive of an internal, psychic struggle. In this new series, swollen, inflated forms in translucent washes invoke bodily organs or shards of skeletal matter, with sprawling tendrils encircling them like venous strands. In these new paintings, the artist’s sanguineous palette serves as a visual metaphor for familial bonds.
The forms are ‘like a blood clot’ and for Ay Tjoe, refer to the way in which family members unite in the face of loss or gather like platelets around an instance of trauma – a motif that is as much about pain as it is about loving unity. In the diptych Covered and Cover #04, the organic form coagulates into further swells of crimson matter and bleeds, dramatically, uncontrollably, across two canvases. Understanding familial ties and the intergenerational as a matter of both socio-cultural and biological inheritance, Ay Tjoe’s paintings point to the interlinking of the body and the mind, and painting as a place where the psychical manifests as material.
Arising out of a pursuit of harmony within herself and for the family, Ay Tjoe’s paintings evidence an attempt to halt a cycle of intergenerational trauma through the act of covering, rather than verbalisation. Together, the works consider introspection and concealment as a protective device that, like a blood clot, exists to encourage the healing of wounds. Applications of oil stick onto a primed white canvas result in visceral, coagulating abstract forms, appearing to metastasise across the canvas as the artist’s grief and trauma is covered, and covered again.