The Fabric of Life
Petra Feriancová and Amanda Kyritsopoulou
Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Deptford
12th September – 25th October 2025
Private View: 11th September 2025
Elizabeth Xi Bauer is pleased to present The Fabric of Life, a duo exhibition by Petra Feriancová and Amanda Kyritsopoulou at EXB’s Deptford space. The exhibition brings the two artists into creative dialogue, following their first encounter in the gallery’s Summer Show. While distinct in medium and tone, their practices share a preoccupation with time, perception, and the intimate rituals of daily life.
Drawing on their archives and symbolic frameworks, both artists explore how meaning emerges through repetition and disruption, attending to the often-unseen systems that shape experience. Their works address the personal and psychological alongside political and mythological themes, merging the private with the utilitarian. Everyday items—cutlery, shells, stains, clothing—are reimagined as carriers of significance, transformed from the residue of lived encounters.
First encountering Feriancová’s work as a young art student in London, Kyritsopoulou now joins forces with the artist to create a dynamic exchange of their shared sensibilities.
Petra Feriancová presents a constellation of new and recontextualised works—suspended fabrics, objects, and photographic series—tracing intersections between motherhood, the quotidian, and political memory. Modest gestures and domestic rituals form her visual lexicon: in one series of postcards, hands are shown in various positions, moving from the banal to the magical. She describes her photographs as “small epiphanies,” pairing image and language as parallel systems, each with its own rhythm and opacity.
Feriancová’s practice centres on subtle acts of transformation. Found materials are juxtaposed with household items: dried swordfish echo the form of knives; watermelons mirror stones; chopping boards slice through language. For Feriancová, transformation need not be dramatic—objects are quietly elevated through association and reframing. This approach reflects her broader concern with how things are misread or misused through cultural bias and collective assumption.
Fabric works embroidered with sentences from her text library of gestures will hang from the gallery ceiling, sometimes held by mannequin hands—what the artist describes as “mini platforms” for display. These works extend her exploration of language and motherhood, where the ephemeral becomes eternal. Text is treated as image and image as text, each phrase conjuring a visual response. Her use of the Hydra, the regenerating creature of Greek mythology, becomes a metaphor for the maternal body.
“There is a common urge to work on personal structures which destroy a system somehow, or the common structures that seem like they are not working anymore. It looks to me quite as a universal phenomenon: there’s no system to trust or believe, to really accept as our own, and even that one, at least for me, is based on doubts and many questions.” – Petra Feriancová.
Amanda Kyritsopoulou’s work examines repetition, routine, and emotional drift through sculptural photographs and staged object arrangements. Drawing on the aesthetic languages of consumer culture, sport, media, and design, she creates constellations of objects that speak to the entanglements of contemporary life.
Her Perspex-mounted shirt series pairs high-resolution scans of crumpled garments with the garments themselves, forming a choreography of torsos across the wall. Humorous yet incisive, works such as Too close to the ironing board address absence, labour, and blurred identity. Using optical trickery, Kyritsopoulou probes the tension between physical form and image, exploring how meaning and “depth” emerge from deliberate flatness.
In her diptych The forensics of seeing it coming, a recurring motif—a person lying flat—introduces deadpan humour as quiet resistance to control and convention. Across her practice, objects and images are choreographed to reveal tensions between collapse and containment, surface and depth, performance and interiority.
Her installations, rich in illusion and detail, invite close inspection, prompting reflection on the pressures shaping public consciousness and private thought. For the artist, making is a cathartic act, a means of processing the anxious textures of urban existence and negotiating the blurred boundaries between work, leisure, and selfhood. She also presents a text-based work—I’ve been good, I’ve been good but not as good as I could have been…—printed on receipt-like paper emerging from a tissue box, its message almost hidden in plain sight.
“I’m interested in distorting reality ever so slightly, as a way of testing perception and opening multiple modes of response and connection to the world. It’s about confronting the personal through the completely insignificant or overlooked and exploring its potential to resonate.” – Amanda Kyritsopoulou.
The Fabric of Life transforms the gallery into a site of quiet tension — where fabric and acrylic, image and text, myth and banality are held in suspension. Feriancová and Kyritsopoulou both work with the sediment of experience — not to narrate, but to test. Their practices are rooted in an attentiveness to the everyday, balancing personal insight with broader cultural critique. The artists question value and perpetuity: how repetition might become a rupture, and how perception — always partial, always provisional — might be held, if only momentarily, in view, before being reshaped again.
This exhibition is curated by Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes.
Notes to Editors
Petra Feriancová (born 1977, Bratislava, Slovak Republic) lives and works in Bratislava.
Petra Feriancová graduated from the Bratislava Institute of Art and Design in 1995, followed by the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava, 1996, and L’Accademia delle Belle Arti, Rome, 2002. In 2016, she completed her PhD in the Department of Intermedia and Multimedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Feriancová is a two-time recipient of ArtVerona’s Premio Level 0 Award, in 2015 and 2019, respectively. In 2010, she was granted the prestigious Oskár Čepan Award for young Slovak visual artists, organised by the Foundation – Centre for Contemporary Art. Subsequently, Feriancová was awarded a six-week residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York City.
In 2013, Feriancová was selected to represent the Czech and Slovak Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Together with Zbyněk Baladrán, she presented the joint exhibition Still the Same Place at the Pavilion in the Giardini.
Additional biennales and international art fairs include BIRDS, MYTHS and TUSKS, Frame, Frieze London, UK (2013); Petra Feriancová: Collapsed Pillar, ARCO, Madrid, Spain (2025); Isolitudine, ZACentrale, Palermo as part of BAM – Biennale Arcipelago Mediterraneo, Fondazione Merz, Italy (2022); Vulnerable, yet Everlasting, Off Biennale Budapest, Hungary (2015); Whatever We Do We Can Not Connect With You, Prague Biennale 5, Prague, Czech Republic (2011); Glocal & Outsiders: Connecting Cultures in Central Europe, Prague Biennale 3, Prague, Czech Republic (2007); and Pyeong Chang Biennale. The Five Moons: Return of the Nameless and Unknown, Gangneung, South Korea (2017).
This exhibition marks Feriancová’s fourth collaboration with Elizabeth Xi Bauer, following previous exhibitions Summer Show (2025); Rock, Paper, Scissors (2022); and Coated in Pre-existence (2016). Summer Show, which opened in August of this year, presents the artist alongside Amanda Kyritsopoulou for the first time, together with two other innovative contemporary artists featured in the gallery’s 2025 programme.
Feriancová’s work has been exhibited widely in institutions across Europe and beyond. Significant solo exhibitions include Eternity, her Responsive Body and Other Stories, Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, Italy (2023); Ego in Habitat, Gilda Lavia, Rome, Italy (2020); AN EXHIBITION ON DOUBT, MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro, Italy (2016); THINGS THAT HAPPEN…, Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples, Italy (2014); PORIFERA II, Tranzit.sk, Bratislava, Slovak Republic (2022); POSTSCRIPTUM TO CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava, Slovak Republic (2011); A STUDY OF THE SECONDARY PLAN, The House of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic (2012); NATURAL SELECTION, Moravian Gallery, Brno, Czech Republic (2008); and A REPORT ON THE TIME SPENDING, Jiri Svestka Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2012).
Feriancová’s works are held in several private and public collections, including the Slovak National Gallery, Slovak Republic; GMB Gallery of the City Bratislava, Slovak Republic; AGI Verona Collection, Italy; Fondazione Morra Greco, Italy; Palazzo Collicola Spoleto, Italy; Villa D’Este Tivoli, Italy; Collezione Planeta Palermo, Italy; Art Collection Telekom, Germany; Siemens Collection, Germany; European Investment Bank EIB, Luxembourg; Lawrence Benenson Collection, USA; and Mario Testino Collection, Peru.
Amanda Kyritsopoulou (born 1989 Athens, Greece) lives and works in London, UK.
Amanda Kyritsopoulou graduated with an MFA in Contemporary Fine Art Practice from the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 2021. Prior to this, she received a BA in Fine Art and History of Art from Goldsmiths University in 2017 and an MEng in Environmental Engineering from the Technical University of Crete, Greece, in 2013.
Continuing her multidisciplinary exploration of text and the visual arts, Kyritsopoulou released her first publication, Bag Shell, in 2021. Written and illustrated by the artist, Bag Shell comprises a series of reflections on the history of bags that investigates the subject as both object and metaphor for urban life, material culture, and art.
In 2025, Kyritsopoulou received the Knotenpunkt ‘Propel’ Grant, which supported the production of her first London solo exhibition, Two Hands Holding One Arm, at Somers Gallery, London, UK. The show was accompanied by a text written by art historian and cultural theorist Dr Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Birkbeck University, UoL. Her debut solo exhibition, The Room is the Limit, was held at Flatlands Projects, Hastings, UK, as part of Coastal Currents Art Festival 2019.
Additional awards and scholarships granted to Kyritsopoulou include the Gilbert Bayes Scholarship Award for Sculpture, 2021; the Selina Cheneviere Travel Award, 2019; the NEON Scholarship Programme, 2019; and the Ivor Ray Award, 2019.
Kyritsopoulou was recently an AA2A Resident Artist at York St John University in York. Previously, she completed a residency at Treignac Projet, France, in 2016.
Kyritsopoulou’s work has been shown in group exhibitions across the UK, Europe, and America. Selected galleries and institutions that she has exhibited in include London Art Services, London, UK (2025); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2024, 2021, 2019, 2018); Kupfer Project Space, London (2023); The Bomb Factory Arts Foundation, London (2023); Greek Ambassador Residence, London (2022); Tube Gallery, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (2023); Athens Conservatoire, Athens, Greece (2022); NADA, New York, USA (2022); and Startup Haus Cairo, Cairo, Egypt (2022).
Petra Feriancová and Amanda Kyritsopoulou: The Fabric of Life will run from 12th September – 25th October 2025, at Elizabeth Xi Bauer’s Deptford location. Open Wednesday to Saturday, from 12-6 pm, or by appointment. A Private View will be held on 11th September 2025, 6 – 8 pm. Artists are available for interview.
