What Repeats, What Remains

Alan Michael, Winifred Nicholson, Carlos Reyes, Jan Švankmajer & Joel Wyllie

17 January—21 February 2026

South Parade is pleased to present What Repeats, What Remains, a group exhibition bringing together contemporary and historical works.

The exhibition considers the gestures and habits through which daily life takes form and how such moments accrue meaning and rhythm — as spaces of memory, devotion or reflection.

Alan Michael’s (b. 1967, Glasgow, lives and works in London) works mainly within the field of painting, with a parallel practice and interest in writing. The work is motivated by the implications and values connected to the literal depiction of Reality and to its implied negative associations. By using existing formats for the representation of reality he sees possibilities for presentations of its display at a time when external political messages concerning the nature, value, and ownership of reality are becoming ever more urgent and contested. He sees the aggregate effects of accumulation via these images and words as akin to psychoanalytic sessions, where all material is of potential significance in the project to gain an understanding of the mind of a subject. This subject might be a person, social relations, a product, a city or a State.

Michael has exhibited widely in Europe and the US in Public Institutions, Non-Profit Spaces and commercial galleries. Selected solo exhibitions include Jan Kaps (Cologne, 2023, 2018), Jenny’s (New York, 2022), Halle für Kunst (Lüneburg, 2021), HIGH ART (Paris, 2021, 2013), Le Bourgeois (London, 2019), Cell Project Space (London, 2018) and Galeria Zero (Milan, 2015). Recent selected group exhibitions include emergent magazine / soft commodity (London, 2025), Boardroom (Glasgow, 2025), Fanta MLN (Milan, 2025), Josey (Cologne, 2025), Schiefe Zahne (Berlin, 2025), Reena Spaulings / Galerie Tenko Presents (Kyoto, 2024), Kölnischer Kunstverein (Cologne, 2023), Stadtgalerie Bern (Bern, 2023), Wschod Gallery (Warsaw, 2021) and Neuer Essener Kunstverein (Essen, 2020) and Frans Hals Museum (Haarlem, 2018). Other exhibitions have included CAC Vilnius (Vilnius, 2016), Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, 2014), the Fiorucci Art Trust (Stromboli, 2013), CPAC Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 2010) and Tate Britain (London, 2008).

Winifred Nicholson (b. Oxford, UK, 1893 — d. Bankshead, UK, 1981) was a pioneering British artist known for her vibrant and lyrical paintings of landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Early in her career, Winifred was influenced by the Post-Impressionist and Fauvist movements, particularly the works of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. She developed a unique style characterised by bold colours, simplified forms, and a focus on capturing the effects of light and colour in her paintings. She had a keen eye for composition and a remarkable ability to infuse her subjects with a sense of life and vitality. Her paintings are celebrated for their beauty, their sensitivity, and their ability to capture the essence of the natural world in all its richness and diversity. She was married to the British painter Ben Nicholson.

Nicholson’s works are held by many public galleries including The Tate, Bristol, Kettle’s Yard, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Adelaide and Melbourne. A major exhibition toured from the Tate in 1987–1988, and there was one at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, in 2001, and Crane Kalman offered Unseen Works on Paper, 2002–2003. In 2003, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, assembled Winifred Nicholson in Scotland. Winifred Nicholson: A Cumbrian Retrospective was at the Castlegate House Gallery, Cockermouth, in 2005. Winifred Nicholson: Liberation of Colour was shown at Mima, Middlesbrough, the Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham and Falmouth Art Gallery in 2016-2017.

Carlos Reyes (b. 1977, Chicago, lives and works in Puerto Rico) continues an interest in the residue of human activity and motion in stasis. Exploring ephemeral phenomena—breath, wind, heat, light, time, movement—as they are imprinted onto material sites and objects, Reyes catalogues the accumulation of experience onto our surroundings. His interventions in everyday objects demonstrate how broad social shifts are enacted individually, incrementally and quietly. Curved metal frames display expired, flattened treadmill belts, revealing exteriors and interiors striated with past motion. Originally developed for the penal system, treadmills now represent self-improvement. Once on perpetual loop in city gyms, these are now inscribed with maximum mileage and spent of traction, exposing the accumulation of bodily weight, sweat and force on their surfaces. Revealing distance, time and endurance, they hover like apparitions of former use.

Reyes’ first institutional solo exhibition was recently held at MIT List Center for Visual Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Past solo and two-person exhibitions include Soft Opening at Paul Soto (Los Angeles, 2024), Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal, 2022), Soft Opening (London, 2021), Waldo (Maine, 2020), Galerie Joseph Tang (Paris, 2019), Bodega (New York, 2018) and Vie d’AngeMontreal (2018). Selected group exhibitions include Tureen (Dallas, 2025), Soft Opening (London, 2025), Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim (Germany, 2025), Hans Goodrich (Chicago, 2024), El Museo Del Barrio (New York, 2024), Marian Goodman Gallery (New York, 2023), Lisson Gallery (New York, 2023), Winter Street Gallery, Martha’s Vineyard (2022), Aspen Art Museum (Aspen, 2022), Theta (New York, 2022), Centre Pompidou d’Art Contemporain (Paris, 2021), PPOW (New York, 2021), Société (Berlin, 2018) and at 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Spazio Punch (Venice, 2018).

Jan Švankmajer (b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia) is a leading Czech surrealist filmmaker, animator, artist, and writer. Renowned for his use of stop-motion, clay animation, and puppetry, his work fuses live action with tactile, often unsettling imagined worlds. Drawing on surrealism, dark folklore, and the absurd, Švankmajer’s films offer a subversive examination of the human condition. He collaborated closely with his late wife, the artist Eva Švankmajerová, for much of his career, and retired following his final feature film, Kunstkamera (2022). Food (1992) examines the human relationship with food by showing breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Joel Wyllie's drawings are distinguished by multiple lines that teem, swarm and gather into forms that are significant for the artist. The myriad lines he lays down seem to grow out of the paper and resemble the beauty of the natural world, such as fish scales or the feathers and eyes of birds. Wyllie’s drawings play with illusion and perception and are simultaneously stage sets relating to lived experiences and portals to another, unknowable and unnameable world.

Joel Wyllie (b. 1986, London, UK) lives and works in Suffolk, England. He graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2015. Recent solo exhibitions include Foreign and Domestic (New York, 2025). Recent selected group exhibitions include Mackintosh Lane (London, 2025), The Artist Room (London, 2024), The Drawing Room (London 2024, 2021), and Kunsthaus Kule (Berlin, 2024).