BODE Gallery Brings Together Four Painters Exploring the Intimacy of Memory

Berlin, Germany — July 11–31, 2025

BODE Gallery’s summer exhibition Drawn From Memory brings together four artists—Matthew Eguavoen, Jammie Holmes, Jerrell Gibbs, and Shaina McCoy—whose practices center around memory as both personal archive and collective experience. Through distinct approaches to portraiture, each artist interrogates the emotional, cultural, and political weight embedded in how we remember and what we choose to represent.

Working from personal photo archives and everyday encounters, Nigerian artist Matthew Eguavoen presents large-scale portraits that engage with themes such as migration, health, and social inequity. With expressive color fields and emotionally charged gestures, his paintings reflect lived experiences in Nigeria and the tension between aspiration and reality.

American artist Jammie Holmes offers symbolic and often surreal portraits that draw on his upbringing in the American South. His compositions are charged with metaphor—roosters, lilies, and fragmented space—as he reflects on masculinity, spirituality, and the passage of time.

Baltimore-based Jerrell Gibbs continues his exploration of Black intimacy, family, and memory through soft, atmospheric scenes developed from personal photographs. His painting With Grace (2025) evokes the quiet focus of a young ballerina mid-movement, caught between the present and the remembered.

Minneapolis-based Shaina McCoy contributes large-format, faceless portraits that are emotionally resonant despite their abstraction. Drawing from family photos and familiar rituals, McCoy offers space for viewers to project their own histories, blending private memory with collective nostalgia.

Presented in BODE Gallery’s new space on Karl-Marx-Allee, Drawn From Memory invites viewers to reflect on the stories we carry—and how art can both hold and shape them.