We are pleased to present an exclusive print by Yulia Iosilzon produced in collocation with Hurtwood Press.
Yulia Iosilzon’s Rafflesia draws us into an enchanting marshland. A serene face guides us into a polyphony of kicking frogs, reaching vines, and an opening flower. Bubbles of frogspawn bursting with amphibian life punctuate the surface like stars in a watery sky. The largest flowers on earth, rafflesia are the living embodiment of monstrous beauty. While they look glorious, in a bid to attract flies as pollinators, the parasitic genus emits some of the most terrible scents imaginable.
The artist created this image on the occasion of her solo exhibition at Sapling running from the 10th of June to the 9th of July 2022. The curator Sonja Teszler wrote a piece of fiction as the exhibition text. The resulting story ‘Frogspawn' is a retelling of Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale 'The Marsh King’s Daughter,’ in which a princess lives a cursed life between frog and human states. In Teszler’s version, the female protagonist embraces her hybrid existence. Iosilzon has incorporated a sentence from ‘Frogspawn’ in her own hand into this edition.
In the marsh, we are simply organisms sipping from one primordial soup. Here in the mud, the beautiful and the monstrous can resolve into a whole. We can be amphibian, drifting like frogspawn in radical synthesis, flies and all.
