As We Read: Ellie Walker and Lily RamÍrez
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RHODES is pleased to present As We Read, a two-person exhibition bringing together works by Lily Ramírez and Ellie Walker.
Marking the first exhibition with the gallery for both artists, the show considers contemporary abstraction as a form of visual language: intuitive, unstable and deeply tied to the act of interpretation.
Bringing together artists from different sides of the world, the exhibition finds an unexpected point of convergence between two distinct practices. Though shaped by different geographies, experiences and painterly approaches, the works of Ramírez and Walker seem to operate within a shared visual language, where gesture, rhythm and repetition become forms of communication that move beyond words.
Working through distinct painterly vocabularies, Ramírez and Walker each employ mark-making as a kind of syntax. Repeated gestures, interruptions, erasures and accumulations form visual structures that appear at once familiar and elusive. Rather than offering fixed meanings, the works unfold through rhythm and variation, inviting the viewer into a process of reading that remains necessarily incomplete.
As We Read is grounded in the idea that perception itself is an interpretative act. The exhibition draws upon the human impulse to organise fragments into coherence, to search for patterns and construct meaning from partial information. Across both practices, abstraction becomes less an escape from representation than a space where memory, sensation and psychological association remain in flux. The paintings resist definitive translation yet maintain an internal logic that feels intensely personal and recognisable.
In a visual culture increasingly shaped by immediacy and speed, the exhibition instead foregrounds duration, tactility and ambiguity. Surface, gesture and material become carriers of meaning beyond literal language, asking viewers to slow down and remain within uncertainty. What emerges is not a singular narrative, but a quieter and more sustained form of attention.
Born in Mexico and now based in the USA, Lily Ramírez develops her paintings through repetitive, distinctive marks that operate like a private language. Suggestive of aerial mapping, notation and coded systems, her works hold traces of biography and memory without resolving into direct narrative. Through layered gestures and shifting structures, Ramírez creates works that feel simultaneously intimate and unreadable, inviting interpretation while resisting certainty.
Based in London, UK, Ellie Walker approaches painting through gesture, materiality and surface. Her process-led practice is shaped by continual revision, layering, scraping, tearing and re-stitching, where the canvas becomes a site of edit and rebuild, behaving like a continually rewritten text or evolving memory trace. Compositions develop through accumulation and adjustment, revealing traces of movement and decision-making within the final image.
Through their differing approaches, Ramírez and Walker propose abstraction as something both intimate and communicative: a language felt before it is fully understood.
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Selected works
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Collecting
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