UNQUIET FIGURES, 2026: Eulogia Merle

In Unquiet Figures, Eulogia Merle presents a world populated by beings that refuse to settle quietly into conventional portraiture. Human figures, animals and hybrid encounters occupy the canvas with an uneasy vitality. Across the body of work, women, men and children appear alongside horses, cats, zebras, elephants, rhinos and panthers, sometimes as individual subjects and elsewhere sharing the same psychological space. The exhibition moves fluidly between portraiture and animal imagery, from Woman, Horse, and the Moon and Boy and Cat to Woman Panther, Elephant and Zebra.

Merle’s figures are deliberately unresolved. Faces are distorted, bodies abbreviated and proportions unsettled. Her expressive handling of acrylic allows colour, line and gesture to compete with representation. Looking across the works, particularly the portraits on pages two and three, there is a sense that these subjects are not posed for our inspection, but caught somewhere between appearing and disappearing. Their vulnerability is countered by an almost confrontational presence.

The animals are equally charged. They are not simply companions or decorative motifs, but seem to operate as psychological extensions of the human figure, suggesting instinct, protection, vulnerability, freedom and the untamed self. In works where human and animal forms coexist, the distinction between the civilised and instinctive becomes increasingly porous. Woman Panther II, for example, places the human figure against the looming presence of the animal, while Elephant creates an unexpectedly intimate encounter between two very different bodies.

The title Unquiet Figures speaks to this persistent instability. These are figures that cannot quite be contained by their outlines, their identities or even their species. They exist in a state of emotional and visual restlessness, simultaneously strange, tender, humorous and disquieting. Merle does not offer polished likenesses or fixed narratives. Instead, she allows imperfection, exaggeration and ambiguity to remain visible.

In doing so, Unquiet Figures becomes less concerned with what its subjects look like than with what it feels like to encounter them. Merle gives us a cast of imperfect, instinctive and deeply expressive beings, each asserting its presence while resisting explanation.