At Gramercy Park Studios, ten artists explore the desire to preserve what is, by its nature, fleeting.
There is something defiant about making art. In a world where bodies age, landscapes erode, and memories fade, the artist attempts to give passing experience a lasting form. Yet nothing made is entirely beyond time. Paint cracks, materials decay, and even the most enduring objects are subject to disappearance.
Impermanence, an exhibition presented by Charlie Smith London at Gramercy Park Studios in Soho, brings together Emma Bennett, Kirsty Harris, Lisa Ivory, Melissa Kime, Concha Martínez Barreto, Hugh Mendes, Richard Moon, Gavin Nolan, Dominic Shepherd, and Joanna Whittle to consider this tension between permanence and transience. What, the exhibition asks, can art preserve in a world where nothing stays the same?
One starting point is the psychoanalyst Otto Rank’s assertion that the fear of death, and the desire to overcome it, are fundamental to the creative impulse. To make something is, in part, to imagine that one might leave something behind. The artwork becomes a vessel for memory, experience, perhaps even a version of the self. But the object itself remains vulnerable to the very forces it seeks to resist.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers another way of thinking about what survives. Art, in his account, does not simply preserve experience by fixing it in a material object; it creates sensations that can outlast the circumstances of their creation. The painting or sculpture is the carrier, but the experience it produces is not confined to its physical form.
A similar idea appears in Hermann Hesse’s image of the river, which retains its identity even as its water continually changes. Continuity, here, is not a matter of remaining untouched but of persisting through transformation. Art might work in much the same way: an object made in the past can continue to generate new meanings as it passes between artist and viewer, and from one encounter to the next.
The collector, too, has a part to play. To preserve an artwork is to maintain the possibility of encountering it anew: to allow something made in the past to remain active in the present. Collecting becomes not merely the preservation of objects, but the preservation of the conditions through which an experience can continue.
Rank begins with death, Hesse with flux, and Deleuze with chaos. All three suggest that art emerges not as an escape from impermanence, but as a response to it. Perhaps its achievement lies not in defeating time, but in making something meaningful within it. The object may eventually disappear; the sensation it leaves behind may prove harder to extinguish.
Impermanence is on view at Gramercy Park Studios, 25 Great Pulteney Street, Soho, London W1F 9LT, through Friday, November 20, 2026. For an artwork list, contact the gallery.
written by Alexa Wang
