CORPUS is thrilled to announce ‘A Void Being’, a solo show by CJ Mahony hosted at The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ. The preview will be held on Thursday 8th October, 6–8pm, and the exhibition will continue until Saturday 31st October, open weekly Thursday–Saturday, 12–6pm.

CJ Mahony’s practice invites confusion between objects and bodies, exploring abstraction as a process of representation and a means of testing the limits of what can be made visible. Working predominantly with industrial materials, Mahony subjects plasterboard to processes of pressure and transformation, producing works that appear at once architectural and bodily.

The work presents a complex image of both exerting and withstanding force. Materials are pushed towards the limits of their structural integrity: surfaces buckle, split and open, recording the pressure applied to them while simultaneously resisting total collapse. These labour-intensive and iconoclastic gestures give the works an ambiguous physicality, suggestive of skin, wounds, apertures or thresholds without resolving themselves into any single image or form. Reflective and dichroic films complicate this encounter further. Ruptured surfaces both reflect and obscure the viewer, projecting light outwards while absorbing and fragmenting what appears before them. Visibility becomes unstable and contingent, shifting according to the angle of approach, the movement of light and the surrounding architecture.

Mahony draws upon this tension between visibility and disappearance to unsettle the cultural demand to be seen and made legible. Rather than offering themselves up entirely, the works resist complete disclosure. Our access to them remains partial: surfaces conceal as much as they reveal, and reflections refuse to settle into stable images. Yet this withholding does not produce distance. The works’ material complexity operates instead as an invitation, drawing the viewer towards their half-hidden suggestions and the possible realities that seem to unfold within and beyond their surfaces.

Following their exhibition at The Shop, Mahony will have a solo exhibition, ‘for fragile insides’, at CORPUS, opening on Saturday 14th November.